The Fall
by AngelTheSeventh
Summary: Life under his rule is like this: you live if you're lucky. You die if you're not. Sometimes that logic gets twisted a bit, but the people of Caliosteo all accept it because they have to. But... some of them won't. The brave ones. The stupid ones. The ones who would give anything to see him fall.
1. The Birds (Part 1)

**_The Fall_**

* * *

 **PART ONE**

 **Chapter 1: The Birds**

* * *

She thought she was alone.

Then a twig snapped. Then the air changed; it was colder now. A creeping warmth washed it away as it slithered up her spine and across her shoulders, settling deep into her skin.

No, she was most definitely not alone.

She kept her small hand resting on the bony protrusions in the rock before her and turned her head. Watched some kind of silhouette approach, outlined in starlight and filled with a blackness that rivaled night itself. "Who," she rasped, meaning to add _are you_ to the end, but her voice was only so strong.

The shape strode closer, and there was no urgency to its motions, like it had all the time in the world and more. In her skyrocketing fear, every moment stretched, each longer than the last. Eternities were passing. Empires would rise and fall, suns would collapse, the universe would draw to its end before the shadow reached her.

And when it spoke, reality's glassy surface would shatter. "Moth."

Moth is her name. Moth has always been her name.

Her nails dug into the rock, finding the cracks and dips in the rock-hard stone that had once been the bone of some creature, long dead. She couldn't bring it back, she knew she couldn't, but she also knew that if she could, it would protect her from the shadow that knew her name.

"Do you know what hides in those depths, child?"

It was a harsh voice acting mellifluous. Moth's eyes drew wider at every word. Every word so human. So familiar.

"What? W-who…" Again—the sentence hung, unfinished. Perhaps it was a question she shouldn't ask. Perhaps she knew the answer.

The shadow came closer. The stars above brightened, reflected so lucidly on the wide expanse of the lake that stretched beyond them both.

The shadow had a face, Moth realized. She made out eyes that were too wide. A mouth, an oddly shaped nose. A face she knew. A face of someone long dead, as her mother told her, a face that was very much alive in the universe of what Moth now knew was a dream.

"Perhaps you don't," he rasped. "Perhaps you want me to show you."

She scrambled back on her hands, gripping at tree roots and weeds to pull herself away as the man knelt before her rock. A protective rage bubbled in her throat when he raised an arm, a protrusion from his dark bulk that reached for the giant bones embedded in the stone. It was _her_ rock, and she was the only one who knew about it, lying there where a mountain, a forest and a lake collided.

The shadow was a man, and the man was supposed to be dead. Why wasn't he dead? It'd been years since she'd last seen him...

"Grandfather," she whispered, shuddering in the dark, "get away." The man froze. He made a strange sound in his throat; a growl.

"'Grandfather?' Disappointing."

"I-I'm sorry," she murmured. "I'll come back home. I won't sneak out again. Please just leave my rock alone."

No response. Time was frozen. Nothing moved.

Her vision dimmed, then it was gone, and a prickling sensation trailed through her body as her senses dissolved. She didn't feel her head hit the earth, didn't see the trails of light and shadow erupt from the man's heart, coil down his arm, and sink into the stone. Wreath the giant bones in a cloak of something between light and dark.

The moon would dim and the sun would rise before she would know again.

* * *

 _Two days. Two days. Two days._

Moth grit her teeth, tensed every part of her body. Her footsteps through the forest's undergrowth were heavier because of it, slamming down on dead leaves, making as much noise as possible to drown out the low drone in her mind. _Two days, two days, two days—SHUT UP!_

Yawning yellow light seeped through the canopy of trees above her, pooling on the earth. Little glowing islands among the dark of the forest, places where the lizards would dart to as soon as the sun was high and bright enough to break through the leaves above. It would never get brighter than it was then, though it was hardly past dawn.

Dawn was when her brothers woke. Dawn was when they'd realize she wasn't home.

She knew what they'd think—Moth ran away. Moth ran because she didn't want to die. Moth ran because she was scared.

 _What's wrong with those reasons?_ she asked herself over _two days two days two days two days._ Indignant anger and guilt clashed in her head. She would be a _coward_ to run. She would be a _fool_ to run.

She would be _alive_ if she ran. There was that, too.

Breathing out heavily through her nose, she broke into a sprint, forcing her legs to move and not stop till they took her home, before she could be a coward and a fool. She didn't trust herself.

Something loud and faraway let out a shriek, and she fell. The ground came up fast, so fast she couldn't even yell. She careened onto her side, sprawling onto the hard-packed earth, arms flailing for something to grab onto. Nothing but trunks and roots.

Her heart had jump-started, pounding not only in her chest but in her ears. It was like it was throwing itself at her ribs, trying to beat its way through her. Fear slipped into her veins, much more potent than the anxiety from earlier, from watching a dead man speak to her—but that had been a dream. She knew it had been a dream. She'd simply fallen asleep by her rock, woke up to its shattered remnants beside her, and listened without question to the deep-seated instinct that told her to run.

Home was where she would have no choice but to fight off the creeping grief, the confusion, even the fear.

Shaking, she scrambled against the wide trunk of the nearest tree, pressing her back against it and brushing the dirt off her arms. In the poorly-woven pockets of her deerskin vest, she fumbled for something long and sharp; a dinosaur tooth.

 _Protect me, please,_ she thought as she stared at it, gripping it from its wide, rounded base. _From whatever that thing was._

Birds were shrieking in the high canopies, flying away in great dark clouds. Their wings flitted across the sun, and the light islands flickered out, again and again.

She'd often thought, looking at birds, that they existed purely to add colors to the world, the ones that lived in their feathers and didn't exist anywhere else. From where she sat, their shapes were dark, no light from beneath to see them by. They were dark as night, the daylight dissolving in the spaces between their wings.

 _Two days._ A certain foolish animosity for the birds sprung up then. _Don't end today, you stupid fowls. I've only got so much time._

They were gone fast. Their wingbeats faded as they left, and the sunlight grew stronger in their absence.

Her grip around the tooth tightened, the serrated edges sending small pricks of pain through her hand. All was silent. No birds, no wind, no rustling of leaves. No otherworldly shriek of a creature foreign to her.

She dug her nails into the old bark of the tree behind her, using it to pull herself up into a standing position, or rather a slumped-upright stance against the trunk. Moth drew in a long, deep breath, pushing off the tree and stepping tentatively away, out into the thin forest trail she had been following. The trail that, somewhere down its length, touched her home village.

A heavy weight slammed into the earth, and it trembled. Her knees wobbled in horror, and letting out a sigh of fear, she turned and ran again.

Her head felt funny. It was being enveloped in a cloud of cold air; chills ran down her spine as she fought it off, but it kept coming back with a relentless insistency. Like it was meant to be there, like she had no right to fight it, like any attempt would be in vain anyways.

 _It's him,_ screamed the irrational part of her brain. _It's him with the undead dinosaurs, they're chasing you, they're going to kill you, all because you ran. They're going to_ kill _you._

 _Your two days are up._

Moth ran and forgot how to slow. The cold came back, settling deep into her thoughts in a way her fear would not let her admit was almost comforting. She stumbled on roots but didn't know how to fall, didn't remember which turns to take on the forest trail, only knew that the constant thudding behind her was footsteps, was death.

All the way, that same part of her mind—the irrational part—cursed the birds.

* * *

 **If you're even the tiniest bit interested in any of this, please follow and review! I'd really appreciate it.**

 **-Angel**


	2. Yellow Horse

_**The Fall**_

* * *

 **Chapter 2: Yellow Horse**

* * *

She knew, or some part of her did—there's a point at which one breaks. Some point, however far away, was the limit.

Moth ran till she didn't know where she was. To her, virtually the whole island was made up of jungles and rivers and meadows she didn't recognize; all she knew was her home and a collection of snaky dirt paths winding through trees of a million species and leading nowhere. And on the island, there were a lot of different little nowheres where she spent her time. The last of her time.

In one nowhere, there was the sprawling skeleton of an ice-age mammal sealed in an enormous stone, bigger than her house, bigger than anything but the most gargantuan of banyan trees. She went there, knowing it was still alive—because nothing dead in Caliosteo was truly dead. The whole place was... restless.

Moth talked to it - there wasn't really anyone else for that. Her brothers knew what was coming; they did since the day she was born, so they kept their distance, most of them—it'd just be harder when she was gone, and they were all so convinced that one day, one day soon, she would be gone.

In a nowhere she didn't recognize, Moth wondered if she'd finally reached her limit. Just briefly, though.

She decided to save her limit for later. For a worse problem. For if she kept running, she'd keep living; the thing on her tail hadn't gained much ground.

But there, in a nowhere, she stopped running. She didn't want to. But her legs seized and she froze and skidded on dirt, lingering in a state of stillness and apathy just long enough to survey her surroundings—trees, no sky, just trees. A worthless observation, a waste of time, and now it would cost her life. The cold was sinking into the gray matter of her brain, touching every thought, calming every nerve. Moth chalked it up to her subconscious knowing she was about to die and her lack of fear was a result of the same.

The sounds of splitting wood and shattering earth couldn't tear through her deadened state of mind; only physical force could knock her down, slam her small existence into the ground where she crouched, subdued into a lack of will to run anymore. Her legs _hurt—_ the only pain the arctic white in her head would let her feel.

Something huge blotted out the rest of reality. The trees around it bent away, branches reaching for entangled trunks, and it was like a mob of people, all arms and legs tearing at other arms and legs in a desperate effort to escape it. But there was no escape from it, not for the trees, rooted to the spot till the end of time.

Moth was still; it wasn't. It burst from the thick foliage of destroyed trees, leaping in a flash of blue and yellow over her head. She had half a second to realize the thing looked like a horse and another half second to realize that that was insane.

It sailed over her head, going way too far for something of its massive size. When its four paws made contact with the earth, it trembled, and Moth waited to see the ground fracture and cave and pull her under.

The equine creature almost toppled with its own weight, giant lion paws sliding over the muddy earth till its flank slammed into another tree trunk, making it shudder. Birds were still pouring into the sky, filling the atmosphere with their warbling terror-songs. The beast lifted its long, thick neck and unleashed a cry of its own, deep and trembling, playing through the earth as much as the air, its power thrumming in the marrow of her bones.

The sound cut off like its vocal cords had snapped. It dropped its horse head and locked its angular blue eyes on her. Moth's mind couldn't get over how huge it was; its forelegs were each near twice as long as she was tall, and the fact that she was crouched on the ground made it bigger.

It was so strange, so foreign. A horse with paws instead of hooves, yellow and navy blue fur instead of black or brown. Human eyes, narrowed in what looked like anger but wasn't. Anger, on an animal's face.

The coldness was like ice. Moth felt things—exhaustion that wasn't hers. A different consciousness, pressing on the edge of her own with a physical weight that fatigued and energized her at the same time. It was comforting, painful, wonderful, terrible, and at once she marveled at the fact she'd lived without it for fourteen years. At once, Moth knew she needed it there, always there.

She looked at the horse creature—not an _it_ but a _he—_ and knew the coldness came from him; knew the skeleton she'd talked to and studied for ages, borne from a stone she'd left shattered on a lakeside, belonged to him.

This was her fossil. She also knew, when he looked at her and saw everything she was and would ever be, he agreed they'd face their deaths together. The final countdown of their lives that would begin in two days.

* * *

"I don't think you get it," her brother growled, shoving her shoulder. Not very hard, but it didn't have to be. "Do you understand what you almost did? If they thought you'd run away, do you know what they'd do to us?"

Moth pushed him back. He didn't budge. Just glared. His eyes were the same green as hers but their similarities stopped there. "I'm fine. You're fine. Everything's fine!"

His face contorted in anger, and his arm flashed out towards the rickety table set up in the middle of the floor, reaching for something to throw at her. His hand found nothing, and he sighed in defeat, suddenly slumping. "No. You're wrong. For the next few years, we won't be fine, okay?"

"Yeah?" she snapped, spreading her arms. "The hell am I supposed to do about it? I can't change the law!"

"So you try and run away? Abandon us to die without you? Would you do that, Moth?"

"No," she shrieked. "No!" Pause. Long pause.

Her older brother stared at her with sad eyes. Waiting.

Then, she said, "But I would if—" His expression didn't change. "If I was brave enough. If things like... honor... didn't exist."

"Yeah?" he rasped. Not angry. Not even offended. "I don't blame you, to be honest."

"If you're looking for someone to blame, go find our parents," a voice piped from the thicker shadows near the corner. Moth didn't look towards its source, because she never could anymore. "What were they thinking, having more kids fourteen years ago?"

"Not their thinking, Eri," snapped her older brother. "The birth order had come. They responded like good citizens and the unfortunate result was Moth and the sack of useless flesh I'm talking to."

Dull anger seeped into her veins at his words. Her muscles tensed, her hands curled into fists. "Leave him alone, Cain," she said quietly. Cain rolled his eyes, breathing out angrily at the extremely rude gesture Moth imagined Eri making in his direction.

"Whatever. Look, the important thing right now is figuring out a strategy. The—"

"I think you're forgetting the yellow horse hanging out in our yard," Eri snorted from his corner. "What's wrong with just showing up with that one? It's, like, king-sized. Will flatten the competition, I'm telling you."

Moth smiled, ignoring the thought in her head that said, _but I don't want to win._ Eri knew. Cain said, "Yeah. Doubt that thing was even meant for her."

"He is," Moth insisted. "Trust me. I know."

"Trusting you is anyone's last mistake, but sure," Cain snorted. "They're supposed to be issued by the palace officials. It probably escaped a convoy. Either way, they'll take care of... 'him.'"

Moth moved and pushed herself onto the fragile table, hoping like she did every time that it'd at least hold till she got off. Every piece of furniture in her house was that way, ancient, unstable, falling apart. Cain was the only one in their family of four that could work—she was a vessel child and had to be unharmed. Eri would've been the same, but he wasn't, and her youngest brother Abel hadn't hit ten, the cutoff age for entrants. So because of that, they had little money. No replacements, just the same furniture for generations.

Their house had three rooms. The main room with their food storage and table, and the two underground rooms. Cain and Abel shared one, she and Eri shared the other. It was always dark, wherever they were. Candles would light it up, sometimes, but that was when they had enough wax to waste some.

"So again. The next order of business is for Moth to develop some kind of strategy. The goal is for us all to come out alive."

Moth hated how lightly Cain talked about what was coming. Like he didn't mind too much one way or the other what happened. Moth knew he did, but…it aggravated her, drove her to madness, somewhere deep inside her mind. She wanted to punch him every time he mentioned it.

"Y'know, I bet half the troops across the islands are having this same conversation," Eri said, sighing. "'Get a strategy! Lose but don't lose! Above all else, come out alive!'" He waved his hands dismissively. Moth looked in his direction long enough to see him do it. "Personally, I think we're going about this all wrong."

"If you disagree, then I definitely think we're doing it right," Cain muttered. "What's your great idea? Better than the last, I hope?"

Moth felt it, Cain felt it. All the warmth instantly sucked out of the room, leaving not coldness to take its place but rather a vast nothing, an emptiness. A void.

"You," Eri hissed, slowly and threateningly. "You shut up."

Moth's twin brother was strange in what he could do. Look at him—and she hadn't in months, but she could remember—he wouldn't seem at all menacing. Just a lanky ginger-haired kid, short like her. Quiet like her. But when he talked, there was something dangerous in his voice. Always. Coiled beneath the surface, a hidden force held back. And when he talked, some of it leaked into the sounds of his words, and it scared her every time.

Eri's last idea was dangerous. Crazy. It was Cain's mistake to bring it up.

"Eri," she rasped quietly, and it was one of those rare occasions when she addressed him personally. "What are you trying to say? What's your idea?"

Another pause. Just shorter this time. "I," he murmured, half to himself. "I don't…it doesn't matter. Never mind."

That was it, that was all he said. Eri didn't leave, but he faded away where he crouched, till there was nothing left of him but a dull silhouette. He did that a lot.

* * *

 **Dinoval - You'll know details when the story provides them. I won't dump everything on the readers at once, and hopefully you'll grow to like my characters as this progresses. Thanks for reviewing!**

 **So I've decided to ask for OCs in this, though whether I use them or not depends on what I get. Basically, if they inspire a new idea/plot thread, they get incorporated. So, then...feel free to put them in a review or PM me or whatever. I think I'll be accepting characters till chapter 10, so there's time.**

 **Anyway, thanks for reading!**

 **-Angel**


	3. Trickster

_**The Fall**_

* * *

 **Chapter 3: Trickster**

* * *

They didn't have a yard, like Eri said. It was the uneven grassy space between the stone cottages and little shops, cut through by shallow dirt paths. Not a big area, and the huge looming horse lounging in the middle made it all that much smaller.

Moth stepped outside and instantly the creature was up on all fours, kicking up clouds of dust staring intently at her. The cold in her head grew persistent, constant.

"You! Moth!" She jolted when someone called her name, the sound stretching all the way across the village. Her eyes found another resident, one of the faces she knew but didn't at the same time. Just another random familiar face.

Moth stepped away from her house, out into the searing brightness of day. The sky, though somewhat crowded with the hundreds of white shapes blindly searching for other white shapes, was too brilliant a blue to be real, lit on fire by the sun. The clouds were joining together in places, graying as their weight doubled. It would rain soon.

He knew it, too. The creature was flicking his ears, bristling his fur. Casting fervent glances above. It was like he feared the sky, just as most did. It had been a giant rock from above that destroyed the ancient beasts of their legends and worship. The sky was huge, menacing, omniscient. The sky _was_ fear.

"Yes, sir?" Moth called absently, attention on the giant horse.

"What is that thing? Is it for the tournament? How'd you get it?"

"I, um," Moth said, voice still raised. "He's for the tournament. He, ah, sort of found me, you know?"

"What—" he sputtered, beginning a walking charge across the grassy courtyard. Giving the blue and yellow horse a wide berth, of course. "Listen here! They'll be here by noon with that doom convoy, and if they see this…this _thing—"_

"It's okay," Moth said as he reached her side. The man was dressed in finely knit cloth, features drawn up in an important glare. Moth looked at him, shrugging. "You know…about the mental link they say the fighters have with their beasts? Because I think—"

"Oh, enough," snapped the man. Moth now knew he was one of the village council sent to document the situation, and he knew her name only because she was a potential-vessel. He was definitely a council type: deathly afraid of anyone from a hundred leagues around the central palace while simultaneously on a mission to make every village resident deathly afraid of him. "That's never been proven. The _point_ is, you're scaring the villagers."

"If it's not real, then why are the fighters always as physically fatigued as the beasts after a fight? Why do they go near insane and die when their beasts are taken away?"

The man was shaking his head. _You're scaring the villagers, you're scaring the villagers._ Moth looked around. She'd never counted the population of her town—it was hard, the unorganized smattering of buildings and uneven grid roads stretched into the surrounding forests and all across the wide field where they stood—but she estimated it was around four hundred people. A good chunk of them were keeping their distance, standing near the tree-line, afraid to get close, but there were masses of them watching her. The creature was staring at them warily.

"Darkforce," the supervisor rasped. "That's all there is to it. No sort of fantastical brain-link. If there's anything of the sort, it's just there to be torn down in the end. Nothing more."

Moth was quiet. She didn't want to think of the future, the day she lost a match and they carted the yellow horse away. To be killed, skinned, slaughtered, eaten, or whatever they did with the beasts they took, because no one really knew. She was still as the thoughts wormed through her head, an irrational terror sending her mind into chaos.

It came from nowhere. She felt a surge of protective fury for the giant nameless beast, refusing to admit to herself that only one of them could possibly make it through the next years, and that maybe neither would.

A growl erupted from the beast's throat; the coldness intensified. And she saw things.

A different world. Untamed. Untouched. A gray-skinned creature, huge like he was, running over a wide, flat earth. A silvery sky, wide as the universe, thin as the edge of a blade, the gossamer barrier, the only thing between the creature and the space beyond the sky. And she felt things—the rush of wind over bare skin, the weight of herself with every galloping step she took. Her lungs, huge, gulping down air, blowing it out. The exhilaration of flight even though she wasn't flying.

She saw other creatures. Big, small. Reptilian, mammalian, avian.

Then she saw her village. The yellow horse was making direct eye contact with her; it was almost a glare.

She understood. He'd showed her his first life, from birth to death in a mere instant, in which he was different but still the same.

"I don't believe you," Moth breathed to the nervous councilman. "It has to be more than that."

"Perhaps," he muttered back, fixing his eyes on the ground at his feet. "I can't say I know for sure."

Then, the sound of hooves on earth. Voices of men, otherworldly croaks of creatures no one she knew could name.

"Oh, skies," the supervisor growled, ducking his head again after a fast glance up. It was a custom; lower your head after every mention of what was above. Moth dropped her eyes. "It can't be noon yet, can it?"

The doom convoy had arrived. It would be the first and probably the last time Moth would ever see it; it only came every few decades. Anywhere between three and six. She didn't know much about it, only that four or five were deployed on each of the three islands. A horse-drawn carriage, a trail of petrified wood cages pulled behind. Men on horseback riding behind and on either side, throwing lumps of meat or fruit to the monsters not containing themselves in stones, locked behind the bars, prodding them with spears if they got out of line. Moth had heard they got out of line a lot.

The block of six heavyset cart horses pulled out of the forest's gloom, all the same purebred dark brown. Three armored men sat high up on a platform behind them, carrying whips or drawn blades that gleamed like swords of light.

The horses were nervous. Trembling. Lips pulled back to reveal yellowed block teeth, hooves pounding forcefully into the ground with every step. As more of the convoy slowly revealed itself, she understood why.

Cages. Stone cages with multicolored monsters, just as she'd been told. They growled and shrieked, rocked the cart. Sniffed vigorously at the air, and as each cage pulled from the forest, another set of eyes turned to Moth's beast.

The yellow horse slowly rose to his paws, short fur bristling, tail twitching. He lowered his neck and narrowed his eyes. Moth felt the wind blow a little bit faster, a little bit colder. It was sinister.

" _Hold!"_ one of the men outside the cart shouted. _"There's a wild one!"_

And everything was thrown into chaos. The beasts in the carts threw themselves against their cages, shrieking and clawing in a desperate attempt to escape—for what? To kill her creature? To run from it?

"Moth," the councilman muttered wearily. "This won't end well for you."

Moth shook her head and she started to run towards the doom convoy, and that single action defied everything she'd ever learned about the king and his palace officials—they were murderous. Ruthless. Merciless. She's surely be executed then and there; they'd assume she had sorcery in her blood, and that would be reason enough for her death.

Still she ran. Shouted, "It's okay! He's mine, for the tournament!" She didn't know if her voice had ever been so loud before.

Several of the men surged forward, wielding huge spears. The second the polished steel edges came into view, the yellow horse behind her let out an earsplitting shriek, and she stumbled and skidded to her knees, hands clamped over her ears.

When she looked up, there were blades aimed at her face and her heart. She felt the motion behind her as the yellow horse strode closer, just a bit faster than how the blades were falling towards her. White-hot fear bolted across her heart.

 _No!_ she screamed in her head. _Stop!_

The blades froze. Everything froze.

"Sky-horse," one of the men murmured. "That's what it is."

"How did it get here?" A question, aimed at her. She raised her head, took in the helmet-shaded faces of four spear-wielding men. Their chest plates gleamed silver, strange symbols and patterns welded into the metal—like growling beasts, wailing faces. Silver fire.

She'd never seen palace men up this close before. Maybe she'd never seen them at all.

"G-get here?" Moth rasped, shivering despite the warmth of late spring. "Oh. That, I don't know."

Cold pressed against the back of her neck. She shuddered. "I swear! The, the Sky-horse found me, out in the woods. I can show you where! The trees are broken and everything!"

The air trembled as the Sky-horse growled. More cold spots broke out on her skin where the blades made contact, forcing her lower to the ground, onto her stomach. She pressed her cheek into the sun-warmed earth, teeth grit against the pain she could feel coming, hanging just on the edge of the next few ephemeral moments.

" _Moth!"_ Cain's voice. "Let her go!"

"Name," barked a guard. Deeper one of the cold points pressed. She felt her pulse against the ground.

"Moth," she choked out. "Moth of the Null-king troop. The house next to the dead oak tree."

Then, from the guard to another, "Check this village's assignments. Now!"

One of the cold points drew away from her skin, but the rest dug deeper as if to make up for the absence. "I'm not a sorceress," she hissed against the dirt. "I didn't revive him."

"Moth and Eri of Null-king," a voice boomed above her head, "are to be respectively assigned a Sky-horse and a Flame-flight for the upcoming tournament. Imagine that."

Moth's heart began to pound a little louder, a little faster.

"So you've got a twin. You, search the house and bring him out."

Feet began to pound away. Terror shot her through; Moth tried to scramble to her feet, but sharp-edged points began to bury themselves in her back. "Wait! No! My brother's not home right now—he's, um, he's scavenging in the woods! I can get him—"

The footsteps stopped. "Scavenging? Why would he need to do that?" The sharp pressure was beginning to lessen.

"Well, we don't have that much money," Moth coughed into the dirt. Slowly, she began to turn onto her side so she could look up—and harsh faces could stare her directly in the eyes and hold her there, frozen in place. "He found a fruit tree the other day. Thought he'd find it again and bring some extra food home."

"That so?"

"Yes! I'll find him! Let me up and I'll be back in a couple moments. I swear."

"Swear? What good is the word of poor tournament fodder like you?"

Fury welled up in her throat, in her chest, in her mind in the form of vile words she could never hope to speak. She didn't have the courage. She didn't have the strength to risk her own life. Not yet.

"She's telling the truth. Just let her up."

And then she felt like she weighed nothing, like the world had been pulled out like a tablecloth beneath her. She was floating, she was flying, she was nothing but the relief that washed away all her fear.

 _He'd_ made it. Just in time.

 _Ty, you bastard. I bet you watched this whole thing._

"Who the hell are you?" One of the guards drew a long knife from his belt and aimed it at the short kid standing awkwardly off to the side, arms crossed, head down to let his dark and unkempt hair cover his nervous eyes.

"Eri. Her brother."

Moth had to swallow a grin. Tyko was no one. Tyko was nothing. But for the rest of their lives, he would pretend to be Eri, her now-crippled, broken twin. Eri, as Cain liked to say, was only slightly more than nothing—not that Moth could bring herself to agree or disagree.

All this to save their lives. Not hers, not his—just the others. Cain, Abel, and Eri.

The knife pressed hard against the skin of his throat. " _You're_ twins," the guard muttered suspiciously.

Ty nervously scratched the side of his head, hand buried in his hair. His hair—that was the problem. Hers was red, his was just dark. Physically, they had almost nothing in common minus their height and twiggy frames.

"Non-identical, as you can see," Ty coughed.

"We get that a lot," Moth added, doing her best to shrug while pressed against the earth. "And what did you say his assigned beast was?"

Anything to change the subject. But the guards ignored the question.

"Let her up," one spoke, drawing his knife from Ty's throat and his spear from Moth's back. As one, the rest fell away. Slowly, fluidly, Moth pushed herself from the ground, brushing he dirt from her clothes and her face. She stood next to Ty, and he leaned away from her a bit. Looked down. It would be bad to have their faces so close, so anyone could see how different they were.

Cain approached, a little slower now that he realized the situation had been handled. He cast Moth a hard, meaningful glance— _this better work. I hope your trickster friend can pull this off._

Moth looked away as one of the guards strode off, spear raised high as he called for the vessel children of their village, everyone ages ten to twenty, to come forward.

 _It has to work. Or we're all dead._

"It makes no sense, _Moth."_ She jumped; Ty flinched beneath his shaggy hair. A guard had spoken, voice rising above the growling of creatures kept behind bars, away from the world that was once theirs. "How could your Sky-horse have found its way to you? We weren't even told to bring any Sky-horse stones on our convoy."

Moth stared at him. Her eyes widened a bit more at every passing moment, at every failed attempt to find his gaze beneath his tri-pronged helmet. "I told you I'm not a—"

"Sorceress? Yes. I know. You couldn't have known what your beast for the tournament was meant to be."

"Maybe he escaped the palace, or wherever you keep them. And found me, somehow."

" _He_." The guard scoffed, walking away, joining the others in loud, harsh cries that swelled to compete with the vengeful shrieks of otherworldly creatures in cages.

Slowly those horrible sounds became too much. There were many other vessel children in her village, and eventually they slunk into sight. The village was large, but the guards knew their cries didn't have to reach beyond the central circle of houses. Their victims had all been waiting there, just beyond the ensconcing shadows, for the doom convoy to arrive.

"I'd ask about your Sky-horse," Ty muttered, half to himself. "But—"

"Yeah, and I'd ask what took you so long to reach me. Just don't bother."

Cain came forwards. He put a hand on each of their shoulders, a gesture that was supposed to be comforting. Ty shrugged it off.

"Hate that thing," Cain muttered, nodding to the doom convoy. "They could just force those creatures in their stones, you know." Long pause. "Well. _He_ could."

Moth struggled to keep at bay the involuntary shudder that passed through her body. "It's intimidation, that's all. The biggest are forced in their stones."

She felt a prick in her temple as Ty's eyes found hers. She looked back.

It was that moment when she felt it. The inevitability of what was to come, the steely clamps that bound her to the path ahead.

There was no way out, not anymore. Maybe, months ago, before the accident, Eri had been right when he—

She killed the thought. Tore at it, ripped it apart, stomped it to nothing.

Again she looked at Tyko, and heard loud and clear the words he didn't have to speak.

 _No going back, Moth._

She stared ahead, at the hulking blue-yellow silhouette standing rigid as it watched the guards in their clockwork motions across the field.

 _I know._

* * *

 **I expect you're all still slightly puzzled. That's fine. Let me try to clear some small stuff up.**

 **In this time, they wouldn't call a tyrannosaurs by its scientific name, because those didn't exist. For a t-rex, the name I'd give it would be a Flame-king, and you can probably figure out why. This is what Eri meant when he said the phrase "king-sized" last chapter.**

 **Null-king: allo**

 **Sky-horse: parium**

 **Flame-flight: dimorph**

 **They get the prefix of their type and the suffix of whatever the hell I want.**

 **Troops will be explained in more depth later on, but they're basically just sibling groups because they live together without parents (when the oldest is past a certain age) in this society.**

 **Tyko is currently an enigma, and you'll start to understand who he is more in later chapters. For now, feel free to speculate.**

 **Dinoval—I'm asking for OCs now because I feel like I'd get better characters if readers don't really know what's going on yet, but you can wait if you want. Thanks for reviewing!**

 **CryoKing96—Yeah, I'm having a difficult time deciding how to introduce every little aspect of this society. There are a lot of details. Technically I think I'm starting in the middle, I guess, but that depends on perspective. And yes, the yellow horse is a parium.**

 **-Angel**


	4. The House Behind the Trees

_**The Fall**_

* * *

 **Chapter 4: The House Behind the Trees**

* * *

"Look," Tyko murmured, hands out to hold the brown-and-red shape as it crawled and flipped around his arms, leathery wings unfurling whenever it lost its balance. "Look at her!" He smiled, almost laughing.

The Flame-flight coiled her flexible body into a sitting position near Ty's elbow, tail curling around his forearm. She looked like a reptilian dog, minus the rounded, blocky snout of hers. Tiny, serrated teeth stuck out from where her beak closed, but Moth couldn't help but feel she was too small to be threatening.

Her greenish eyes locked into Ty's, and his smile melted.

Moth grinned. "You can hear her mind, can't you?"

Ty could only nod. In a bright flash of brown and blue, the Flame-flight suddenly burst from his arm, shooting straight for the zenith of the sky. They both craned their necks to watch her, ignoring the chill that traced down their backs when for a brief moment, all they saw was blue.

She spread her webbed wings, drifting in fast circles around the sun like a halo, whipping her tail from side to side and letting out grated, warbling cries.

"Hawk," Ty muttered.

"What?"

"I'm naming her Hawk."

Moth kept her eyes up. She could almost make herself believe, when the glare of the sun was strong enough to dull and mask the edges of her silhouette, that she really was a hawk.

Moth glanced back to earth, gazing at the Sky-horse standing a few lengths away, long neck stretched to the sun. She wondered if there could be a name to suit his regal grace—and nothing came to mind.

Thunder rolled from the horizons. A storm was brewing in the roiling mass of gray and white clouds gathered there, creeping ever closer to where the sun rested oblivious in their sky.

Hawk began to fall. She tucked her wings in, snout pointed down, a red and brown arrow about to strike the earth's heart. Ty let out a breath of surprise and confusion, almost calling out _wait!_ right before she made impact. But she didn't make impact.

She merely vanished, folding in on herself, and in her place a gleaming black orb thumped gently onto the ground.

"The stones," Moth muttered, once again glancing at her Sky-horse and wondering what his stone would look like; feel like. Ty darted forwards to pick it up, kneeling with it in the hard-packed earth. With slow, careful motions he traced its sharper edges, protruding from an otherwise round shape. "Is that… black glass?" she asked uncertainly, kneeling next to Ty on the ground.

He held it towards the light. It gleamed with a purple sheen, the thin edges and points almost translucent. "It's volcanic glass," he said quietly. "Obsidian."

"Obsidian," Moth repeated, narrowing her eyes at it. She reached out tentatively, running a finger over its smooth side. It was warm, like there was something burning softly on the inside. "How do you know that?"

She looked Ty straight in the face. And he flinched.

Tyko was a runaway. Why or from where, she wasn't sure—he'd said it was just another village, kind of far away but not really. She imagined someplace in the jungles, near Ribular's other coast, but he'd never given many details. He'd made her promise not to question it, but that was near impossible. She knew there was nothing volcanic about Ribular, though; definitely no obsidian anywhere.

Ty gave a small laugh. "How would you _not_ know? Seriously—don't you have any record halls in this village? Somewhere you can read things and learn."

"Shh!" And then she slapped her hand over his mouth—the palace soldiers were coming into view, from the clusters of trees where they'd vanished to distribute the tournament creatures. She couldn't have Ty saying suspicious things while they were in sight of him. He cast them a sideways glance, peeling her hand from his face and gripping her wrist.

"Yeah, let's go." He stood, dragging her next to him. She kept her eyes on the Sky-horse, glaring with a slanted blue gaze at the soldiers, as Ty led her away. Towards home.

* * *

"So. The doom convoy gone yet?" Cain asked irritably, emerging from the shadow-casted stairway leading below ground. His eyes hardened with distrust when they found Ty.

"No," Moth muttered. She leaned against the wall by the small, square window, staring out as the soldiers loaded and unloaded heavy equipment; fed their horses, with eyes so wracked with fear they looked dead and ghostly. A few soldiers—three—followed the councilman Moth had talked to earlier to his cabin, where they'd stay till it was time.

In two days.

"It will be," Ty said quietly. "But they'll leave some of their men behind. So Eri has to—"

"Yeah, yeah. Got it." In the corner, Eri was slumped on an old chair. His limp legs stuck straight out into open space, arms crossed over his chest, unkempt copper hair hiding his face. "So, Ty, what makes you worthy of taking my place in the tournament, huh?"

Ty looked up, startled. He stared blankly in Eri's direction, something like horror on his face.

"I'll give you a reason," Cain suddenly growled, surging from the stairwell, finger pointed like a knife to Eri's heart. His green eyes were stricken with anger; in the dark, Moth could see it. Feel it. "He didn't try to die."

Dead silence. And now Ty was staring at _her._

Eri's eyes took on that malicious, angry sheen—so they weren't jade, they were red. He opened his mouth to speak, but Moth cut him off.

"I'm going," she rasped through a dry throat. Panic was gripping her insides with hot claws.

"Where?" Ty managed to ask.

Moth ignored him, nearly sprinting for the door and slamming it shut behind her, pushing off in an attempt to start running.

Her foot caught on something and she catapulted into the earth, breath ripped away.

Cursing to herself, she gathered her limbs and peered over her shoulder to find what she'd tripped over—a rock. A white, pockmarked rock. It hadn't been there before.

She sat up, reaching for the curious stone to pick it up. The moment she touched it, bolts of cold energy raced up her arm like violent shivers, as if brought on by the gales of a storm.

"It's you, isn't it?" Moth whispered, eyes traveling across the empty and flattened grassy spaces where the yellow horse had been. Now only the metallic scent of thunder and lightning lingered, the ghostly tainted air where the creature had stood, neck stretched upwards, contiguous with the sky.

She wrapped her hands around it, fought off the trembles gripping her bones.

Pushing herself to her feet, Moth shoved the stone in one of the cheaply-woven pockets inside her vest, hiding it from the outside world. She didn't know why—it had to do with the strange surge of protectiveness she felt for it; no, _him._ And she could feel the emotion bottled and cast back at her, like the beast felt the same way.

Moth started to run again. She ran to leave their tiny stone cottage behind, her brothers locked inside it. To ignore the seed of guilt that'd sprouted when she realized she'd left Ty alone, caught in the middle of an argument he didn't need to be a part of, surrounded by her brothers that shared none of her reasons for trusting him.

She crossed the clearing, a streak of red, giving the village leader's home a wide berth, pretending she couldn't feel the stare of someone from within peering out at her, following her, never leaving her.

She entered the forest, the very same forest she'd traipsed through at night, where she'd slept and had the dream about the dark man spinning the Sky-horse from rocky bones and bursts of light, giving it a heart and mind woven from stone and Darkforce.

The man—who wore the face of someone long-dead, draped in robes of concentrated shadow.

The forest—where she ran from the beast, borne of her dream.

She didn't know where the line had been, that night - between fantasy and reality.

She walked fast down the wide winding dirt path, branching off in other directions to lead to houses hidden away behind masks of leaves and wood. There was one she was looking for, a short, small one, ensconced in the shadow that sieved from the dark places of the forest. The door was made of rotting wood, stout with a small piece chipped off at the top. A small bird could fly through it.

Moth rapped her knuckles against the palest, driest part of the door. She stepped back, shoving her hands in her threadbare pockets, waiting for it to open.

Soon enough, she could feel a presence on the other side of the door. And then she could hear it as it struggled and swore, trying to wedge the door from its stubborn frame. It jerked open, swinging inside, and a worn and tired face stuck out, stripped of its youthful beauty and sagging with the weight of empty words and broken promises.

"Moth," she rasped, a sad smile breaking the sadder frown.

"Hello, Mother," Moth whispered back.

The woman's smile became a grin, and she ripped the door open a little wider, letting the muted candlelight from inside seep from the widening crack. "Come in, kid. It's good to see you."

"Who's there, Sage?" boomed a much stronger voice, muffled by walls. Sage—her mother was named for her deep green eyes, the same ones she gave to Moth and her sons decades later. Moth was named for what the village called bloodbacks; little white moths with red furry backs and a population that oddly surged before wintertime. They seemed more attracted to starlight than lanterns or torches. Moth could almost remember the way she'd been told the story, staring into her Mother's eyes. Sage's face was a portal to Moth—she'd look at it and see her reflection, aged forty years. She saw her future self. She didn't always like what she saw, but that was it.

"Your only niece," she called back, laughter in her voice.

Moth stepped beyond the threshold, letting her mother lead her down a dark, narrow hall, following the light till they emerged in a small room with a wooden bench pushed against the far wall and a long table, its surface holding two wax candles, burning like warm eyes in the dark. Standing over the table with a cup in his large, sinewy hand was Moth's uncle, a tall, rough man. His dark hair burst from his head and his face in unkempt swathes, an explosion of black.

Another cup rested on the table, probably her mother's. Moth got the feeling they'd been talking about something; like she could sense anxious, weary words still hanging in the air. Her uncle raised his free hand in greeting, nodding to her as if accepting her presence. "So the doom convoy rolled through today, eh?"

Moth was halfway through a nod and her mother snapped, "Alister! Don't talk about it."

Before she'd registered what her hands were doing, Moth had reached into another pocket and pulled out the electrified stone, setting it down on the table for them all to see. "Sky-horse. I…received him today."

Sage shook her head, hand over her mouth as she stared at the porous, bleached-white rock.

" _Sky-_ horse," Alister exclaimed, setting his cup down and leaning over the table, brow furrowed. "You've got yourself a tough bastard there, Moth." The excitement in his voice was a mask for the wariness she could hear, lingering beneath the surface.

"Yeah," she agreed, crossing her arms. "I think I'll make it far."

"Don't say that yet," Sage muttered gravely. "Sky-horses are powerful, but you've…yet to see the competition, yeah?"

Her words meant: _don't win._

Moth already knew not to win. Every vessel child knew not to win, not that it mattered. Some poor, unlucky soul always came out on top.

 _You'd hear,_ she remembered someone old and long dead telling her, years ago, _all the competitors talking up a genius strategy to fight hard and still lose, give everything and still be ejected from the tournament with all the rewards they could reap. Yet you'd watch 'em step into the ring and all that planning and strategy would fall right away and they'd fight with everything they_ had. _Darkforce screwin' with 'em. Or maybe it's fear._

Fear was powerful. It'd compelled her to hide her broken brother; beg a lost boy she barely knew to help her, to save him.

If the guards or anyone outside their family discovered Eri crippled, their brothers would be dead. Her mother would be dead.

If the guards—or skies forbid, _him—_ watched her fight and saw her falter, watched her beg for defeat with no words, everyone she loved would be ruined or killed.

There were the stories of rebel entrants, refusing to let their beasts fight in the tournament. And they'd vanish like ghosts by the next day—not dead. Somewhere else, somewhere worse.

What choice did she have but to give everything in battles she didn't want to win? What choice did anyone have?

"It's alright, Mother. I'll place sixth or something—they always reward the high-placing real nicely. And you and Alister can get a new house, somewhere better."

Sage's tight, worried eyes bored into her daughter. _No._

An unexpected shudder made her skin convulse, made the air colder than ice. She shook her head. "I didn't come to talk about that. I just…needed to get away from my brothers."

Sage sighed, knuckles paling as her hands gripped the table edge. "It's Cain, isn't it? Picking on Eri."

Moth nodded. Alister tipped his head back, taking a long swig from his cup. The liquid's strong scent wafted to Moth's nose and she tensed, recoiling from its sour aroma. "Boy's been through a lot this past year. He's stressed—supporting his brothers and sister all by himself. Cut him a break."

Moth scowled. Sage looked down - and then Moth realized it was a half-nod of agreement. Something began to burn at the pit of her stomach. _Why is it Cain you're concerned about?_

"How's Eri holding up? He's still painting, right? Better not have quit - he actually had some talent."

Moth smiled a little, thinking of the little wanton specks and swathes of color decorating the corners of walls, the back of chairs, the edge of Eri's bed. Small fragments of rainbows seemed to follow him wherever he went, rubbing off his stained hands—or, they used to.

Cain had stopped buying him the dyes and the bamboo canvases from the village shop, so Moth would bring him flat stones and bark pieces and flowers from the forest—till he told her to stop. He'd sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the brilliant mural roiling over the opposite wall, a chaotic mess of colors Moth knew she'd only find there, in his room. They didn't truly exist in the world, not till Eri had brought them to life.

 _It's okay,_ he'd whispered, not meeting her eyes when she tried to hand him a thin piece of slate and some red flowers. _You don't have to do that anymore._

She kept at it, at first. But not anymore.

Her smile went away. "N…no. He, he's just…getting over artist's block is all. Or whatever he calls it. I'm sure he'll be back at it soon."

She needed him to be back at it soon. The rainbow pieces scattered about the house were fading.

"See that he does," her mother murmured, downing the last of the mystery liquid in the cup. "He needs to focus on something other than his…disabilities."

"Cain's not making it easy."

Sage's features tensed, her hand curling tighter around the empty cup. Alister was glaring at her as she spoke. "Cain... he needs some more time to accept what's happened. He and Eri were close, you remember. In the meantime, try and make sure he realizes what happened was an accident. Not Eri's fault."

Moth flinched, almost shrinking away from her mother.

Because she was wrong. It wasn't an accident—a truth only she and Cain knew.

She noticed Alister giving her a strange glance, face contorted like his drink had tasted funny. She shrugged off the look, recomposing herself, turning away.

"What about Abel? He still sick?"

 _I came for more than this,_ Moth realized, scowling at her mother's question. _I didn't want to talk about my brothers. I didn't want this visit to be the same as the rest._

 _So why am I here?_

"He's…recovering," she muttered absently. "Look, Mother, Uncle…" She trailed off. Both fixed her with intense gazes, and she resisted the urge to cower beneath the weight of their eyes. "If something happens to me in the next few months, what will you—"

"Stop." A harsh, rough-edged command. Sage fixed her daughter in an angry stare. "None of that."

Alister looked down, looked away.

"I refuse to think about mourning you when you're still here. I've done enough of that with Eri. Okay?"

Moth looked at her, through time into the face of a much older clone of herself. She realized the answer was unsatisfying—even though she didn't know what she wanted her mother to say. "Okay."

"Go home, Moth," Sage murmured, crossing her arms. "Eri can't stand up to Cain on his own. You were always the peacekeeper, you know?"

Moth shrugged, ignoring the prick of hurt in her stomach.

"Oh, don't give me that look. Your uncle and I have things to discuss, that's all." A sharp, pointed glare in Alister's direction.

Moth forced her face into a mask of calm as she backed away, nodding to her uncle and mother. She grabbed her stone off the table and put it away, hand still curled around it in her pocket as she stepped back outside into the gloomy trees.

She leaned against the rotting door—a pit gaping deep in her chest, an empty hole where the wind whistled through as it blew.

She waited.

And then the voices sounded—harsh. Angry. Both competing with the other. She listened to a small irritated squabble from behind the door crescendo into a maelstrom of curses, shrieks, violent words. Sharp like knives, twisting in her flesh, relishing at the blood that began to flow. Pressed against the door, she listened.

" _How could you lie to her, like that? She's your daughter!"_

" _When the hell did I lie?"_

" _You lie when you let her believe you love her."_

And then, Moth was running again.

* * *

 **This took awhile. Sorry for that.**

 **Graceful Rage- For a sungari, I would give it a different suffix, not 'flight', to distinguish it. A coatlus could be a Sky-flight, though - basically my rule for this is that all names will be different. And that answers your other question. And yeah, I hadn't thought about it before, but I guess this is kind of like _Hunger Games_ in a way. Thanks for sending in an OC, but I'd love it if you could give me a gender(sorry...haven't heard the name Sigurd before and I don't know if it's male or female) and a short outline of their personality so I can have a better idea of how to use this character. Anyway, thanks for reviewing!**

 **If you have an OC idea, I'll be taking them for the next six chapters.**

 **Review!**

 **-Angel**


	5. Evil

_**The Fall**_

* * *

 **Chapter 5: Evil**

* * *

" _Jump." His voice was quiet, like the word scared him. He swallowed, shuffled his feet on the hard stone beneath them. "That's all we have to do."_

 _She felt the flesh of the inside of her throat dry up and crack when she tried to speak, when she felt her lips move but heard no sound._

 _He turned his head, to look out at the hazy light of dawn, the blushing pink colors cast by the sun clouding the edges of the sky. Looked at the canopies of green trees, the sea of jade and viridian. He looked at it like he was seeing it all for the first time or the last._

No, _she wanted to scream. She grabbed his arm, anchoring him to one spot, preventing him from moving any further._ You won't. We won't.

" _We have a choice, Moth," he snapped, whirling to face her, to grab her by the shoulders. One of the moments where she swore he was taller than her even though they both knew he wasn't. She and him were the same—his face was a mirror to hers, minus the more feminine curve of her nose and her jaw. His green eyes were hers, his angry thoughts, his unkempt fiery hair. "For the first and last time of our lives, we have a choice. We can grow up in fear, fighting battles we can't win or lose, knowing we don't even have anything to fight for...or we can just choose not to. It's not giving up, Moth—it's making a choice."_

 _The ground fell away, inches from their feet. All he had to do was take a step backwards. All she had to do was not let go, not fight, make her choice._

 _She spoke. She didn't hear her words, she only watched the sad curve of his mouth as he smiled at her, as he dropped his hands to hers and squeezed. Something beat at the inside of her skull, writhing in pain, in terror, some many-legged creature that tore at her thoughts in frenzied desperation. It was part of her, the part that made the other choice._

 _She was holding his hand as her thoughts spiraled into a maelstrom of screams she couldn't decipher, faces she'd never see again. Her nails dug into his flesh as they stood on the edge of the rock face and looked down. As she let her eyes fall closed and her body fall forwards._

But when her eyes opened, she was sobbing silently, clawing at her hair, burying her face into the layers of cloth packed beneath her. Her face contorted, her chest heaved, tears poured from her eyes. Her hand stretched out for the small thing she knew was lying beside her, the electrified stone half-hidden beneath a piece of fabric—upon contact, invisible, gentle sparks traced up her arm, a calmness seeped into her thoughts, but it wasn't enough.

The darkness was blinding. There was nothing to see but the sloping of the sheets around her body, the valleys and summits they formed, illuminated by the muted starlight that fell through the tiny sliver of window near where the wall and the ceiling met, that small part of their room that was above ground.

She coughed, the muscles in her chest contracting painfully with the force of her sobs as she tried to swallow them away.

"Moth…" The raspy voice from the bed below hers made it all worse. She shoved her fist against her mouth, trying to stifle her hitched breaths. She pulled the stone closer to her body.

"It's fine. You'll be fine." Right—he thought she was crying for a different reason.

"No," she whispered, forcing the tremors out of her voice. "Just go back to sleep."

"You're the one who needs to sleep. They cart you and Tyko away at dawn."

"I know," she murmured into the cloths of her bed, pulling them in a bundle around her when the cold of night danced across her shivering skin.

"You know what happens when you go. All you have to do is pay attention to everything they tell you. Best chance of…"

 _What? Winning?_

She let out a wavering sigh. "Two days ago," she began, sniffing, "you said me and Cain were…'going about this all wrong'. Remember? What was your idea?"

Silence.

"Tell me, Eri."

She listened to the creaking of his bed frame as he shifted. "It's not what I know you're thinking, Moth."

She flinched.

"Doesn't matter now. Just go with our strategy—fight with everything and drop out somewhere in the top ten, if you make it that far. Don't try and lose in the beginning if that might happen anyway later on, no matter how hard you fight."

Moth nodded. The best idea. The idea that half of the troops across Caliosteo probably shared, the plan that would save them and sacrifice everyone else. It would only work for some—for the strong or the smart or the lucky.

Her stomach began to churn, because she didn't know if she was any of those.

When dawn rose, there would no longer be a choice. She could feel the clockwork of the world turning, shifting on its axis as the countdown ground on, numbering the last hours in which she would be herself, in which Eri was Eri and Ty was no one. She sensed the weight of the choices she could make in those moments—jump, run away, _jump—_ and felt them deteriorate as she let seconds pass.

Her heart fluttered faster than before.

She pushed herself off the bed and jumped down to the floor, startling Eri where he lay.

"What are you doing?"

She stood, alone and awkward, beside his bed, dull eyes falling on the square of darkness and silver light that slipped through the window. "Skies. I don't know." And she didn't, she really didn't. Like hell she had the courage to run. And they both knew she didn't have it in her to jump.

It was dark out there, but the sky was a lighter blue than the dead of night should have been, a tentative color that didn't have a name, not really. It was a shade between shades, a harbinger of dawn—knowing that, there was no way she would force herself to sleep again, force her mind into submission to melt away those last hours of the closest thing to freedom she'd ever feel.

She gripped the rock even tighter. Thunder rippled from outside, the echo of it billowing into their tiny room.

Moth paced towards the doorway, sighing. "I'll come back before dawn. You know, to... say goodbye."

"Moth," he whispered as she left, but she didn't respond, stooping to grab her vest near the threshold where she'd tossed it. Silent as she could manage, she stalked through the short underground hallway and up the stairs of tough cobblestone—she was nothing more than a breath of wind caught by a window and spun throughout the house, silent, almost unnoticeable.

Almost.

At the top of the stairs, she stopped, some half-buried instinct inside her forcing her body to freeze when she felt eyes bore into her back. She whipped around and didn't know what she expected to see there—the all-too-familiar face of a certain dead relative she thought she saw, those few nights ago out in the forest; the dark silhouette of the metamorphic tyrant who ruled the universe; _Eri—_ never mind how impossible all of it was.

But he was none of those people. He was just Tyko, standing alone at the bottom of the stairs, watching her.

"Can't sleep either?" he asked, so quiet she barely heard him. Or maybe she didn't—maybe she knew what he was going to say, maybe she could somehow read his lips in the darkness.

She shook her head, beckoning for him to follow her.

Moth emerged into the cold room above ground, where the rickety door was always left ajar, another place where the night could seep through and chill everything. "We don't have that much time left," she rasped, hearing him approach behind her. "So why sleep it away?"

She sat down in one of the chairs at the table, feeling it wobble beneath her weight.

"Well," Ty said quietly, "if you're asleep you don't have to worry about it."

"But if you're already worried about it, you don't sleep."

"Funny how that works."

Silence. Ty sat at the other chair, crossing his arms—and in one of his hands she could see the small dark stone that held his beast—and staring out through the open window. Moth draped her vest over her legs, feeling the hard thing inside one of the pockets: her dagger. The dinosaur tooth she'd found, out there, somewhere near where the Sky-horse's first body had fallen.

She'd shown it to Ty before. _That's a Sky-king tooth,_ he'd said. _Trust me. See the serrated edges? The way it thins out here? That's how you know._

Moth would have to leave behind the Sky-king's tooth. Any weapons minus the beasts themselves were strictly forbidden.

"You know," Ty said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. "You still haven't told me how exactly you found your Sky-horse. He couldn't just show up out of nowhere, Moth. There's something you're hiding."

 _Oh,_ she though meekly. _This._

She turned over the pumice stone in her hand, flinching at the bursts of invisible static that rippled up her arms, the sweeping coldness through her head.

Visions. They were back, sprouting just as wanton rushes of foreign emotion, flashes of color, but blossoming into memories that weren't supposed to be hers, reeling before her eyes like she was living them.

She tensed, closing her eyes, but the colors intensified. The sounds were louder, rougher—she saw flashes of light, of hot red and cold, stark white, a jolt of pain behind her eyes, the silhouette of a figure standing over her—but none of it was real. None of it was hers. Rather, it belonged to the Sky-horse contained within the pumice stone she held. Rather, it was his first memory of this life, the hot and painful moments of rebirth.

"Moth?" Ty's voice sounded so far away. "Moth, are you okay?"

"Fine," she murmured, straightening in her chair. "I'm fine." The flashes were dissipating, but the cold wreath around her mind was still there.

 _No,_ she thought frantically. _No. That was a dream. He didn't find us in the middle of the woods. He didn't revive you in front of me._

The coldness surged in power; she shivered. The Sky-horse was trying to tell her something, manufacturing images and emotions and shoving them at her, begging her to understand.

That it was real.

He had come to life on the shore of a lake in the dead of night, taking his first breath in a world devoid of anything but darkness and the sound it makes, the chorus of crickets in the bushes, the lapping of water on the bank, the footsteps of an old man walking away.

Maybe he heard her breathing, where she lay—just beyond the boundary of the forest, passed out from fear or from the sorcery of the man who was contiguous with the night. Maybe the events had played over and over in her head while she slept, her dreams morphing the memory into something unfamiliar, even chimerical.

Something about it all had startled her awake, hours past dawn, fear fueling her mad dash from the lakeside and shattered rock, stumbling through the undergrowth of the forest, her crazed emotions ricocheting between her and the Sky-horse, woken by her terror.

It was tumbling from her lips now; she could feel it if she couldn't hear it. Ty was staring at her as she spoke, his dark eyes pulled wide.

She must've mentioned something about how she trekked to the lakeside as often as she could to sit by the remains of the Sky-horse's first life, how somehow she felt a sort of connection with a skeleton, because he nodded in recognition—he knew that part. She'd told him before, and it had only added to his confusion as to how she suddenly had a live beast.

Maybe she started talking about the evening she stayed out too long and fell asleep, not wanting to return home, how she'd noticed the dark-robed figure approach her in what had to be a dream, how she could've sworn it was her dead grandfather. Not how a small part of her knew that it wasn't.

"And then what?" he asked.

"And then he revived the Sky-horse. And the dream ends."

"Moth. The dream…" He was shaking his head at her, face ashen, eyes bright with awe. "Moth, it wasn't a dream. You know who that was, don't you?"

 _Yes._

"I know who I thought it was," she said, exasperated, leaning forward across the table to look him in the face. "I swear it was him, Ty. "

"You knew your grandfather?" he asked softly, skeptically. "Be honest, Moth; are you sure?"

There was something in his face, something she didn't like. It was pity.

"Yes," she snapped. "I did. I saw him around the village before he died, Ty—he's talked to me. About the tournament. He knew things about my mother that only her father could know…" She trailed off, eyes darting back and forth across his face, wondering why that expression of pity had some fear in it now, too.

"What about your mother?" Ty asked urgently, quietly. "What does she say about him?"

"She…she says nothing. Won't talk about him. He's been gone so long he has to be dead."

"Have you ever told her you met him before he disappeared?"

"No. He said... I couldn't."

Silence. The part of her that knew the man was not really her grandfather and her dream was not really a dream also knew what Ty was getting at, why his face was so fearful. It was the part she clamped down on, suffocated, ignored.

"And then, he showed up by the Sky-horse fossil," she murmured, running her fingers nervously over the stone in her hands. "Brought it back. Maybe he's a sorcerer." She forced a laugh.

"No." Ty said it firmly, his voice hard as steel, staring her straight in the face. "Moth, it wasn't a dream. The man who found you that night was Zongazonga." She barely had time to flinch at the name, to duck her head and clamp down on her tongue before she could blurt _I know_. "The man you've talked to, the one who looks like he's your grandfather, he's Zongazonga."

She was silent and still. Here he was - he'd never even met the man and he had the strength to realize the truth, to say it out loud, and then there was her - suffocating it in the dark part of her mind for years, desperately refusing to acknowledge it.

"Your grandfather was the Majestic Vessel fifty years ago. He won the tournament, didn't he?"

Moth pulled her knees into her chest.

"Think about it—your mother won't talk about him because he's long gone. I bet she never knew him. You can't tell her you've met him because he's _not really him._ She'd know. He makes his rounds, Moth, every so often, every few years—there's nowhere in Caliosteo our dear old king hasn't been."

She closed her eyes, burying her face in her knees. _Every few years._ Last time she'd seen him, she'd been nine; after he left, she'd convinced herself he died because he never came back. Before that…six? The memory was a smear at the back of her mind, a blurred image of herself falling at a tall man's feet, staring up to realize he looked familiar, a face she'd seen before in someone else's, ghosts of his features in that of her brothers and her parents.

"Why would…he…talk to me, Ty?"

"He must've known who you were, Moth. A vessel child, a relative of his current body. He's the most powerful sorcerer in the universe; of course he knew."

"Yeah?" she rasped, swallowing hard, sighing a muffled sigh into her knees. "That's not really an answer."

"How's this?" Ty asked, and she listened to him lean closer to her, across the table. She raised her head. "He saw something he could manipulate. I don't know why he would, I don't know why he gave you the Sky-horse before the doom convoy. Maybe there's no good reason, maybe he just felt like it."

She was quiet, staring back with hollow eyes.

"But you thought he was a good person, didn't you? As your grandfather, anyway. Some kind, wise old man. Look, Moth…"—his eyes suddenly turned intense—"You can't do that, with Zongazonga. He doesn't think like we do. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, no matter whose body he says it with—remember that he's _evil._ I... I can't define evil for you, Moth, not really, but he's the only definition you need. He is the personification of evil, of savagery, of bloodlust, and his people mean nothing to him."

* * *

 **Sky-king: tarbo. Moth has a tarbo tooth. Technically I'd reserve 'king' for the strongest theropod of the type. Tarbo used to be, but then aeros came along... But I don't know what else to call tarbo but I have ideas for aeros, and tarbo was the OG strongest anyway, so there.**

 **And since there are tarbo and parium fossils around where she lives, you can probably deduct that her village is near the lake of Petrified Woods. Probably. I'm pointing it out just in case.**

 **Anyway! I'd be so thankful if you reviewed and sent OCs if you've got ideas!**

 **-Angel**


	6. Runners

**_The Fall_**

* * *

 **Chapter 6: Runners**

* * *

 _She didn't like the way he was staring at her. His features were frozen between expressions she couldn't decipher, like he was afraid moving them at all would give him away to her, all of him, and his eyes were tense and dark and cold like she'd never seen them before._

 _It was worse than the time he first found her. He didn't stare at her like she was a threat to him then—in the first moment, she was merely an enemy._

" _I know… it's a lot to ask," she murmured slowly, thumbing over the curved edge of her Sky-king tooth, lodged deep in a pocket of her vest. Tyko was weaponless but somehow, in all the months she'd known him, she'd been aware that to fight her and win would be easy for him. Weapon or not._

 _He was small. His frame was built narrow, fragile; and looked like he'd spent most of his life trying to fight it—lifting heavy things, wielding weapons, scaling cliff faces, hunting against the law for the sake of a family she wasn't sure he had, trying his hardest to break himself down so he could build back up different, better._

 _He was small. But he was not weak. He could help her._

" _Yeah. It's a lot to ask."_

" _I don't know you," Moth blurted, curling her fist around the wicked-sharp remnant of a beast so powerful in the ancient days of its life that it'd been dubbed king of the sky. It didn't matter it'd never bore any wings, because there had never been any doubt it deserved its title. "I don't know where you came from or why you ran from there, but you've… you've helped me before."_

 _She shifted her weight, clenching her toes inside her worn-out moccasin boots and trying to grip the damp, dark earth beneath them. Because she felt like she was falling again. She felt like she was Eri and Ty was herself, and she would fall and fall till the ground came up beneath her to reduce her bones to powder. Moth shifted and the light sieving through the scattered forest canopy danced and darted across her body and wreathed her skin in ethereal golden warmth, still shielding him in verdant shadow._

" _Did you run because… because you were afraid of…" She'd stopped. The words lodged in her throat. She gazed at him more intensely now, the question turning foul in her mouth, because she knew he wasn't the type to fear things. He looked like her but he was nothing like her._

" _The tournament? No."_

 _It was exactly the simple answer she was expecting. "So why did you run—?"_

" _Moth."_

 _She froze in her shifting because now his voice matched his eyes._

" _Don't ever ask me that. If I'm ever going to tell you anything, it's not now. It's not tomorrow, it's not the next day. If you promise never to ask again—if you promise to trust me fully—I'll help you."_

 _She should have nodded and retreated through the woods without another word; she should've ran home, fueled by nothing but the hope he'd lended her and the idea that maybe she and her brothers would be okay. She would have burst through the door and hugged all of them. She would have looked Eri in the eyes. She would have laughed with Cain for the first time in years. She would have been the first person ever to put a smile on Abel's face._

 _Instead, she tilted her head out of the glare dribbling from above, feeling the Sky-king tooth graze through a layer or two of her thumb flesh. "Why help me at all?"_

 _It was merely another question he'd never answer._

* * *

She'd run the numbers in her head before. There should've been eight hundred vessel children in all aboard the rattling doom convoy as it snaked along a thinning dirt path curving along a cliff face, the edge overlooking a sea of undulating green canopies far below. The convoy's last stop two days earlier was her village, so the two hundred give-or-take vessels from there had crouched, silent and somber in the carts for hours as the convoy rolled back into towns delivering odd stones to scared and starved children who'd marveled at the electricity or heat or cold or pulse emanating from a rock tentatively clutched in un-calloused hands that'd never worked a day before. There should've been eight hundred children like that—but there was no way the meager number of them came close.

Four towns. She counted. Hers, a small spattering of buildings in a field and a forest's edge, still there only because of the food it exported to the central palace. Then a sprawling metropolis fanning out around a lake that glittered in the slight glow of dawn, alive with the choking reek of fish. And then a city surrounded by farmland. And then a tiny, pathetic sort of town clinging to life under the cover of thick jungle trees. She watched the children from each of them board the convoy with stones pressed to their chests or clasped in their hands—black obsidian, quartz spheres, pumice and sandstone, heavy granite.

Some of them looked at her. In each expression was something familiar mixed with something foreign—both would understand the other's fear, but both had a different way of dealing with it, of living with the situation, of coping with the pressure of protecting themselves and their families and their beasts. In each expression was something Moth could learn from. In each was a desperate question she'd long since answered for herself.

She sat cross-legged on the hay-strewn floor—two days ago it was a cage barely strong enough to resist the rage of beasts unwilling to seal themselves in stones before the odd emptiness in their minds and hearts had been filled. The biggest of them, too strong and heavy for mere cages, had been forced to stone and bound in sorcery from the central palace till the vessel child assigned to them had taken their stone in those pale, soft hands and made them whole, effectively breaking the Darkforce spell and sealing the fates of the both of them.

Ty was beside her. He was lying on his back, between her and a small throng of vessels from the lake city huddling together, whispering about something while they still had voices. Ty was half-asleep, hands folded behind his head, half-buried in the hay strewn across his body. It'd taken her half the journey to notice his Flame-flight had crawled out of her obsidian shell and was huddled on his chest, leathery wings draped across him like he'd told her he was cold and she'd jumped to do something about it. Her eyes were wide open, her thick sunset-colored beak resting across his shoulder.

She wanted to smile, looking at them. But too much had happened that morning. This wasn't enough.

There were runners every year: people that tried to escape the convoy when it returned to take them away. She'd watched it happen twice—someone hadn't been present when the convoy docked in the center square of the city. The first time, when the missing girl was reported to be nowhere in town, Moth had nearly choked on her horror when she'd watched the head convoy guard extend his arm to the sky and stare up into it like he was inhuman and felt no fear for what was above. From the diamond stones in his hand burst two purple shadows unfurling in the dawn light—great wings webbed in dead flesh choked of blood, eyes like sinister binary suns rising at the speed of sound. Z-beasts. Hunters, born of the King's own sorcery. Tyko had whispered to her: "She'll be dead before we get there."

"There" was about as descriptive he could be about the convoy's final destination.

The second time was much less dramatic. It was a young boy that tried to run at the last moment. A guard hit him down with the flat of his spear, spat in his face something he must've rehearsed: _"You have attempted to escape the noble fate of a vessel child in the tournament of our King. You now have a single choice to make: Will you beg for death here and die a coward, or will you choose the honor and dignity of a warrior?"_

They'd soon led him, trembling, onto a separate carriage of the convoy. He'd been cheated out of the "honor and dignity" his choice was supposed come with.

The convoy lurched to the side as its wheels displaced the loose stone and dirt of the path, careening them to and fro—Moth tensed, hand tightening around her stone, face pressed to the metal grid walls of the cage to watch the far-below canopies swing closer with every stumble of the cart.

They weren't far from the top of the cliff now. That's where everyone said they were going, though to listen to anyone else shut in her cart would force her to ignore the fact that none of them knew anything. They'd perhaps been doomed to participate in the tournament since before they were born, but growing up it'd been such a taboo that no one dared mention it to their faces; no one protested when they were permitted to eat first, never mind it had never been their own hands hard at work to earn the food, to help provide for the others in their troop. Perhaps they thought any mention of what was to come would drag them to their knees in despair—they must be the weak type, after all. Never worked a day in their lives.

Moth didn't need the word of tournament fodder to help her make sense of logic. They were going up. Soon there'd be nowhere to go but down. Nowhere to go at all, because the destination had been reached.

" _Hey."_

Moth jumped, whipping around when a cold finger pressed into her shoulder. She found herself close, too close, to the pale and staring eyes of a young girl, lying across the hay on her stomach and trying to slither closer to Moth, one of her tiny pale hands gripping a granite rock.

"Feel this."

She thrust her stone at Moth's open hand—Moth raised her eyebrows at the girl, watching her flick her thin blond hair over one bare shoulder, then wriggle to a sitting position on her knees. She wore a white dress that looked like it was made of bedsheets torn up and crudely knitted back together. Dark, sooty stains scored up the sides and around the hem like she'd walked in ashes. She couldn't have been older than ten—the absolute youngest of any vessel children. Her face, gaunt but angelic, was split in an unnerving sort of grin. Toothy and oddly genuine.

Tentatively, Moth closed her fist around the stone forced into her palm, almost expecting flickers of electricity to dance between her fingers—but the experience was starkly different. The rock felt warmer and gritty in her palm, coating it with a fine layer of dust, like it was a stone that'd been pulled from the core of the earth and left to cool for just a little while. Moth felt herself smiling back at the girl, not knowing why it was suddenly so easy. There were the runners; the girl and her undead winged hunters, the boy sobbing somewhere in the corner of his cart. And her brothers. She'd said goodbye, and so had Abel, sick as he was; and so had Cain, sad as he was; and Eri—he'd said something more.

"He's _really_ strong," the girl suddenly whispered, like this was supposed to be a secret between only them. "His name's Dusty. He likes digging. And he's really really strong."

"Mhm," Moth agreed, nodding her head in time with the little girl's as her odd grin split wider.

"Show me your stone. Please?"

"I…" Moth shifted, crossing her legs beneath her again and leaning against the side of the cart. Rustling hay beside her told her Tyko was waking up again, shoving Hawk's weight off him and wincing as she climbed up his back to perch on his shoulder.

"Sure. Here." Moth withdrew a hand from the inside of her vest, opening her hand to reveal her bleached-white pumice stone. The Sky-horse's presence in her mind was like a tide on an empty shore—it settled sometimes, flat on the surface and smooth as glass. Other times, she'd feel a roiling undercurrent beneath the surface, sending waves of sickening uneasiness through her gut. Still other times the waves would break farther from shore—excitement or the razor edge of anger.

Now the tide was high. Her beast wanted to tell her something, something about this odd grinning girl, but even he didn't know what that was.

"Ooh," she whispered. "A sky beast! I can tell."

"You can… touch it if you want," Moth said, shrugging, unsure if that was a bad idea or not. She tensed as the girl's hand flashed out, resting on the surface of Moth's stone for barely a second before she whisked it back, giggling at the spark she'd felt.

"I like Dusty's rock better!"

Moth smiled again, handing the girl's stone back to her. She was rather impressed—even a girl so young and naïve as this one had thus far refrained from revealing anything about her beast but its name. Every tournament, most vessels knew not to reveal the specific kind of beast they would fight with, lest they give another fighter an advantage and suffer the dire consequences of losing in the tournament's beginning rounds. This girl seemed the type that wouldn't know about the secrecy rule or forget it if she did.

Tyko knew the rule. Nonetheless, he'd spent the first half of the journey convincing Moth that he didn't give a damn who saw Hawk out of her stone.

"What's your sky beast's name?" the girl asked happily, a finger hovering again over the pumice. The tide dragged at the shore as it receded, curling into a few small breakers father out.

"Arashi."

Before she spoke, she didn't know the answer to her question. She'd spent two days toying with sounds in her head, word fragments attached to other word fragments, etymology and meanings crammed together in the form of a name that was easy to say, fitting of the powerful Sky-horse contained within her stone, and more than just a pretty nonsense sound—it had to mean something.

Arashi was the best and entirely spontaneous combination of all those things. She felt the tide recede and soothe itself into stillness.

"Oh. Since when?" This time it was Tyko speaking. She looked and saw him sitting like her but leaning over his lap, trying not to flinch as Hawk's small claws dug into his shoulder. Moth thought her eyes were smiling as her big head swiveled back and forth, leaning closer to sniff at her and gaze down at the stone in her hand.

"Since now." Moth shrugged. "How can you sleep?"

The little girl dragged herself rather clumsily into a sitting position, staring out through the bars at the morning expanse of the world below. "Oh, I slept great last night," she announced. "I was really excited when I woke up!" She murmured to herself as she sidled away from Moth, drumming a few fingers on her granite stone.

Moth watched Tyko's brow knit briefly at her words, but he chose to ignore them. "Because I was tired," he said simply. "Aren't you tired?"

Moth felt the exhaustion like added gravity, but there was a wild sort of agitation brewing in the pit of her stomach. Pseudo energy, it felt like.

"And…" Moth looked up as Tyko continued to speak. "Hawk thinks we're there. It's funny—like she's trying to use my thoughts to learn to communicate with words."

Moth stared at him, unsure which part of that she should respond to or ask about and feeling the agitation go ice-cold—still screaming through her veins, but frigid this time, painful. She clenched her fists, shivering, thankful electricity was hot and burning. Staring out behind her, she thought she could trace the curvature of the world with her eyes from this height as the convoy turned onto the flat plateau of the cliff, as the sun slid higher in the sky and stained the edges of everything an ephemeral gold.

"You know what it means if we're there… right?" she asked Tyko, curling her fingers around the metal bars.

Tyko didn't say anything. It didn't mean the tournament was about to begin—no, they had days for that. It didn't mean there was no longer an escape for them—there had never been a way out, not even for Ty. Only Eri had ever managed that.

She looked at Ty. He and Hawk each had her fixed in a stare that near mirrored the other.

Moth swallowed. "It means the girl's dead." She turned back to watch the sun, trying not to shudder at what happens to people who try to find a way out.

* * *

 **In my not-so-brief hiatus, I have** **decided this story will be organized into three unique parts. Part 1 focuses on Moth. Part 2 and 3… you'll see. From here on out, chapters will slowly start to increase in length. This weird short-chapter limbo in the beginning is going to fizzle out.**

 **Oh, and a reminder, because I'm sure everyone's forgotten about this story: I'm still taking OCs. I've got three so far and they're definitely getting interesting roles. (Thank you Graceful Rage, Starry's Light, and CryoKing96!).**

 **I also went back and revised the last five chapters. I didn't really add to or take away from the descriptive passages; it was more of a hunt for details I've mentioned that I either wanted to change or use later. One of the only major differences now is that a Fire-flight (dimorph) is now a Flame-flight because I want all the beast prefixes to be one syllable.**

 **The name of Moth's parium, Arashi, does in fact have a meaning like she said. It translates as "storm" in Japanese, not that I speak Japanese.**

 **Anyway, review!**

 **-Angel**


	7. Selfish

_**The Fall**_

* * *

 **Chapter 7: Selfish**

* * *

When the convoy halted, Tyko made her wait. She was fine with that—she preferred to stare at the arena from behind the bars over milling around at its base with the gathering crowd of vessel-children outside the carts, craning their necks and letting out sighs or staring over the cliff edge into dawn oblivion and realizing it was too late to run now, and maybe they should've taken their chances earlier, like that girl from the lake village. She was a brave one. Moth could feel them wishing they were brave too.

She and Ty were last out of their cart, stepping through a small metallic doorway cut into the bars and jumping the distance to the ground—craggy, dead earth crumbled beneath their feet. Clumps of pale grass sprung up in cracks in the stone, the only places seeds must've been able to lodge before the stronger winds of that altitude blew them over the edge and into the jungles and forests below. The cliff itself gave way to a wide plateau face that stretched far towards the northern horizon and dipped down into a jagged alcove where masses of trees sprouted, but she couldn't quite see far enough to know where it fell away to a sheer wall of rock again, or if there was a village or two farther from the hulking arena, perhaps spared this time from the twenty Ribular villages selected to give their children for the tournament, perhaps empty of any children at all for fear they'd be forced to compete anyway.

The arena itself looked more like a fortress, and perhaps in a way it was. It was a rising, gargantuan structure, its colored sandstone walls set fully ablaze by the sun. At its base and set into the walls higher up were arch structures and pillars etched with squared-off angular patterns; perhaps if she could look closer, they'd look like a few species of ancient beasts caught in a duel, different patterns and creatures and fights wrapping all the way around the sprawling arena's circumference and up the sides. At the top were ringed pillars supporting large stone bowls, likely for fires for the matches that would take place at night. Maybe the lightning and fire from the warring beasts themselves weren't enough to see by.

Stepping off the convoy, she and Ty were halted by a stocky figure clothed in a light sort of armor—he had a helmet, but it was hooked to a belt around his waist, exposing a craggy, wizened face. Shocks of white hair still sprouted above his eyes and in unkempt clumps around the bald spot on his head. He held a thick bound notebook in both hands, squinting down the bridge of his roman nose at what was written there.

She wondered if he was too old to use the spear sheathed at his side. She decided it didn't matter, because he certainly wasn't too far away.

"Eri of Null-king," Ty said cheerfully, tentatively holding out his obsidian stone. It caught the light and gleamed—Moth imagined if he held it up to the sun, they might be able to see a tiny curled-up Flame-flight at its core, like an embryo, dormant to her but alive and active in Ty's own mind.

The man raised his milky gray eyes to stare Tyko in the face, like there was something wrong with what he'd said.

"Flame-flight," he offered, giving a half-nod and raising his stone.

The guard furrowed his brow and turned his attention suddenly to Moth. "And you?" His voice was as old and strong as Moth had imagined it—she could see him standing here five decades ago, glaring with stoic skepticism at the meek faces and voices of vessel children long gone by now. Or perhaps he had been one himself. It was easy to picture him in the arena, side-by-side with perhaps a Sky-sloth, standing strong against the roaring of the crowd.

"Moth," she said. "Null-king. Sky-horse." His eyes barely grazed the pumice in her hand.

"Huh," he muttered. "Not too many Null-kings these days." He drew two quick strikes on the notebook page with a quill pen he held between a middle and pointer finger. "Gather by the guards and prepare to enter the arena."

She glanced across the space between the convoy and the arena where the less-than-eight hundred vessel children were trying to line up, herded in opposite directions by armed guards—and now that she was watching, now that she knew the men might have them, she could notice the ephemeral glimmers of diamond stones catching the light, hidden inside tense fists or small pockets hanging off belts, ready to release at an instant's notice the Z-beasts they contained.

She had to remember—here were over seven hundred ancient beasts, revived with power greater than they'd ever held in a past life. If all the vessel children released them at once, they could reduce the plateau to rubble. If any child dared show signs of aggression or disobedience, they would have to be taken care of in seconds, lest he or she trigger a revolt or a massacre.

Perhaps if she was a little more reckless and had a little less to lose, she would try it—maybe raise her stone to the sky call for Arashi, never mind she could do it with barely a thought, never mind he could do it himself. It was all for show. From the moment she raised her hand till the moment she was pinned beneath the heavy red talons of a Z-king, she would count down, doubting every time she'd make it to the next second till she didn't. Just to see how long it would take them.

" _Move it!"_ The guards sounded like they looked, tough and fast and paranoid—and she flinched, no longer sure she'd ever have the courage to stand against them.

"Come on." Tyko touched her shoulder suddenly and she followed him, phasing into the crowd of children too nervous for the immense power they clenched in their fists and trapped in their minds. A ring of guards circled the mass of them, guiding stragglers from the convoy toward its edge. A few took their places on the sweeping stone staircase at the arena's main archway, just high enough to see the stretching edge of the cliff from where they stood. The man who looked like a Sky-sloth was among them, whispering things to the man and woman beside him as he cast scathing glares among the vessel children, who were falling into an eerie silence as the last of them gathered.

Moth watched the man pick her out among the crowd—it couldn't have been too difficult. Her hair must've been glowing like fire in this light.

He pointed to her and her throat went dry, watching him mutter furiously to the taller, younger man beside him, scribbling things down in another notebook.

Moth elbowed Ty, who she swore had remained beside her—but the boy who had somehow taken his place was much taller, and the burning glare he shot her made her fists clench and her teeth grit. He looked like he wanted to hit her, but he wouldn't dare move or even speak into the silence.

She shifted far away as the Sky-sloth man spoke, his voice the same as it'd been when addressing she and Ty, yet louder, more powerful, something that led her to believe she had no other choice but to listen to him.

He spoke and the guards behind the vessel children began closing in, then the men on the sides thinned out, moving into place until a pathway towards the steps had been formed, ringed on the sides by men brandishing spears.

She began to move, watching the guards on the steps as they made their way across the arch's threshold, seemingly oblivious or indifferent to what was following them.

She thought the steps may crack or turn to dust beneath her feet—she didn't know how many decades the arena had been standing to serve the same purpose it had for as long as their King had been their King, but they were strong and adamant, hardly disturbed by the weight of so many underfed Caliostean children. The whole structure had been built to withstand the force of earthquakes, firestorms, hurricanes, tsunamis, anything the beasts themselves had the power to create and more. As she passed through the arch and then across the edge of where the light couldn't reach in the tunnel, she felt the weight of old, musty darkness gone undisturbed for years and years, wishing she were at the front of the group so she could look for footsteps in the dust still lingering from the last time vessel children had entered this place. Her grandfather would have been among them. She was walking exactly where she had, too nervous to run over again in her head the careful strategy Cain had laid out for her in the moments before she left him, never mind the fact he knew nothing about the structure of tournaments or her odds against the other competitors, but it didn't matter, because he was only trying to help her. That, or trying to make up for the all the years he'd been distant.

Besides, she was only interested in what Eri had told her. The odd, insane things he'd told her when no one else was close enough to listen.

Hallways branched off from where they walked, wide to encompass huge groups of people, staircases in the dark to lead them up to the stands. Moth descended with the group, following the sound of breathing and the scrape of moccasin or hide against dust and stone till the walls inflated around them, expanding to another wide arch where gray morning light seeped into the darkness, untouched yet by the sun but bright nonetheless, more than enough to see by and take in the vastness of what they stepped into—a pale expanse of dust and hardened dirt, wide enough to contain every building in her village and more—wide enough to contain herds of the largest beasts, the earthshakers, if they still lived, truly, free of stones that could seal them away.

She gaped like the rest of them. Empty stone stairs rose on each far side to function as both seats and walls, she guessed, reaching just high enough to keep out any sunlight for some time yet—and from the inside now, as she was jostled nearer to the arena's dead center, she realized the place looked like it'd been hewn from the cliff itself and thus was sealed to the ground beneath it, not by its foundations but because they'd never been separate.

"Fall into formation!" A sharp, unfamiliar voice from one of the guards. "Masters of Flame-beasts, farthest to my right, then Earth, Sky, Sea, Null to the left. I want a clear grid and a single arm's length of space between each of you! Do it now!"

She lurched, because to disobey orders from men that wielded those sinister diamonds suddenly seemed unthinkable. Those of Flame and Null stones had it easy—they broke to opposite sides of the arena, still close to the center, gathering and falling into rows and columns.

She caught a glimpse of Tyko moving away from her. He was small in such a crowd, able to duck seamlessly through the mass, darting in and out of her vision, here-there-gone like a hummingbird.

Moth stepped back, gripping her pumice and letting herself be swept with the crowd toward the very center of a grid gradually falling into place. She set out in search of an open area in a fourth-or-fifth row, far from the guards and almost invisible. She found herself in the middle as she wanted. Standing at the head of a column as she'd tried to avoid.

She was still amidst the restless silence of shuffling feet, jostling bodies, arms raised and lowered to measure distance, the clinking of metal as spear sheaths were adjusted. No one else dared speak, not even the guards. Not till the restless silence was accompanied by restless stillness, the tension of so many held breaths and clenching of fists around sharp-edged rocks.

Five or so guards stood at the head of every type-sector of the grid. More were behind them, Moth knew, but her attention was fixed on the Sky-sloth man and the two beside him. They had put away their leather notebooks and stood somberly a distance from her, staring with eyes she could feel, motionless in an unnatural way.

Moth dropped her chin and studied the old dust patterns at her feet for what felt like some large fraction of an eternity, till she was sure it was warmer than when she'd entered and she was many times older than she had been before the convoy left with her.

She was expecting the voice sometime after she'd settled into herself—she was expecting it to jolt her when it sounded, so it didn't. It was the Sky-sloth man who spoke.

"Look at you!"

But he was looking at her.

It was a voice that would carry to every corner of the arena, but not so powerful as Moth knew he could sound that it would seep over the walls and into the outside world—no, on the outside, the arena looked as dead and old as it had before they entered.

"The lot of you."

She felt the collective ripple of motion as heads lifted, wanting to look the man in the face but faltering before their gazes could pass his neck as he paced, dragging heavy leather boots in the dust of the arena. Soft clouds drifted at his feet.

"You're exactly the weak, starved, broken-down bastards anyone'd expect. Try and exude a little self-respect! A little strength!"

Moth's head tilted. She didn't stop herself and didn't care his gaze kept flitting back to her. He sounded almost fatherly.

"You're pathetic. It's saddening to see what vessel children have become. The lot of you used to be noble, powerful. You used to carry this burden with dignity. Now look at you."

She stared at the children beside her, catching what she could of them out of the corner of her eyes.

"Time has made you weak. And time has made our King the most powerful being from here to the ends of the earth. Were he any stronger—I dare say it could have been enough to halt the sky's meteor in its path when the beasts you hold in your hands last walked this world."

Slowly, every head began to fall again. The clear sky above was reason enough for uneasiness—the man was foolish to mention something as evil as a meteor while standing below it. Not that there was anywhere else to stand.

The man froze. He stopped nearer to Moth this time—she could see the whites of his eyes when her shiver had passed and she thought it safe to raise her head again.

"You are selfish in your weakness. This tournament will remind you of that. This tournament will cure you of that."

 _How?_

She couldn't have been the only one to think the word. Perhaps enough of them had, and the Sky-sloth man heard it.

"You will never again cry for yourselves. Our King, great immortal genius as he is—he has orchestrated something rather beautiful. A tournament in which you do not fight for yourselves. You do not even fight for him. Your purpose, standing here, is rather to fight for the preservation of all you love."

Moth wondered—had he spoken those same words before? Was every vessel child across the islands of Caliosteo listening to them now?

Or perhaps this was the first and only time anyone would hear them.

"There are seven hundred and thirteen of you here. Not a one of you wants to win." Pacing again. "All of you want to be back home with your families by the end of summer—mere months from now. I stand here to tell you that to achieve this would be granting yourself and your loved ones a fate worse than death. Lose in this arena and you may suffer in other ways, but as for your family—it simply depends on the will of the King. Relocation. Separation. Recruitment. A guaranteed place for your descendants or even your entire village in the next tournament. There have even been cases of replacement—your own troopmates entered in your place, should you lose too early or too easily."

Like that—the warp and weave of Cain's plan was unraveling through her fingers. She bowed her head and watched the weak strands of fabric disintegrating in the dust at her feet.

"The only advice I have for any of you is to win. Win, and your village and loved ones will be rewarded—not punished. They may be granted money, food, protection, better homes, as long as you fight well in the next months or years. As long as you entertain. These benefits may remain even if you lose, assuming you've fought your hardest. It simply depends on the will of the King.

"But win the entire tournament—however unlikely the victor turns out to be any of you—and you will be granted these rewards and more. You will have ensured nothing short of immunity for all you care about. Your troopmates will be safe. Your families. Your village will not be reaped for participants in the next tournament."

Moth's head snapped up.

"You see, vessel children of the King's sixteenth tournament, you have everything to gain and more to lose."

That wasn't right.

No, that was most definitely wrong.

The Sky-sloth man retreated, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. The tall, younger man that had arranged the grid began to take his place, walking not with solemn control as he had but rather a permeating authority that might've made her want to bow her head again—but Moth had hardly yet noticed him.

Because the Sky-sloth man must've misspoke. Either that or Ty had been wrong a night ago, when he spoke with such surety, such intensity about the man she'd always known was Zongazonga, however unconsciously, however stubbornly she'd ignored it.

If her grandfather had won fifty years ago, if he had become the Majestic Vessel—then her village should have been granted immunity from the tournament. She should not be here. Eri should not be crippled. Tyko should not have taken his place; no, she wouldn't even know he existed.

She would perhaps be someone different. The tournament to her would mean nothing—unfortunate for those entered in it, yes, but not worth much thought. She was just a girl, and she would grow up to be just a farmer or a woodworker or an artisan or a merchant or even a priest of the skies. She would be hungry and poor but without fear. Without any fear at all.

"Right, right. You all get it, huh?" This new man, as Moth could tell, was crude and so distant from the people themselves that he could never understand what scared them about this tournament. "Win and you protect your family, lose and you condemn them. It's very simple."

He stopped in place, ran a hand through flattened black hair.

"Now, as for… the difficulties. The number of you is all wrong, to say the least. Seven hundred thirteen. It's not easy to form teams with that." He sighed, an odd, grating sound like his throat was made of stone. "We had a cleaner number last week—seven hundred five, predicted. Unfortunately, there was a runaway incident we've since handled, and we got lumped with a couple Cranial and Ilium vessels this tournament." He shot a glare to Moth's far right. The Null sector of the grid. "That means we delay aptitude testing for a little while. Get into something we call whittling rounds."

His face split into a sinister grin and Moth had to hear the gasps from behind her before her heart went cold. She didn't know what he meant, but a few of the others did, and it was already enough to make her want to run again, in spite of what she knew would happen to her if she tried.

He crossed his thick arms over his breastplate, ground his heel into the dust. The clouds he stirred up were violent and opaque, not like the gentle wisps of dust that skipped on the heels of the Sky-sloth man as he paced. "Oh, they'll be fun. I can already tell. They were decreed by the King himself; just a little something to trim the numbers a tiny bit, weed out any boring competition, keep things interesting. You know, your job's not just to win for your families—you have to entertain too. Don't, and that makes you subject for disqualification all by itself."

Maybe there was a sob far behind her. A fast, pathetic sound.

Maybe it was in her head—not hers, but in her head nonetheless.

"Ah, don't scare yourselves yet! We've got time till we start the whittling rounds. Just about enough for me to tell you how they work!"

She wasn't sure why, but her eyes sought out the Sky-sloth man and watched him as he stood stone-still, far beyond her.

"We let you loose, basically. You and your beasts get free reign of the forests from here to, well—the Z-beasts will keep you inside the boundaries. And keep in mind it's every man for himself when we start. You're on your own till we can trim the number down to something workable. Or till we feel like calling it off."

The murmurs, the shifting—they were like currents through the grid. The tide in Moth's head had been still glass before; now the waves shattered on a mental shore, churning and heaving in on itself.

She allowed herself then to move more freely than she had since she stepped off the convoy—her whole body swiveled, her head lifted so her eyes could search the crowd for Tyko, never mind he was probably too short for her to see. She had to know, if she could, if he was close to her or not, if she was near enough to talk to him with her eyes, to ask him about all this because of course he knew—somehow, she was sure there was almost nothing he didn't know. Just far too much he wouldn't tell her.

A flash of light like the sun breaking through clouds made her flinch and whip back around, facing forward to see a pit of glowing white between her and the man expand and dissipate, blinding, yet she was unable to look away again—at its center burst a gigantic silhouette, a shape that took on dimensions as it grew, as the light about it died, as she was suddenly able to see it as it really was.

A Z-king then loomed beside the crude, dark man, its heavy skull ducked just low enough to avoid the creeping tide of dawn light, its cobalt eyes evil and empty like it had no soul, its bloody knife fangs clenched so hard they'd lodged themselves in the Z-king's own flesh. There were no nerves to feel the wound or blood to be drawn from it.

"Oh, relax!" the man cried, shifting to rest a hand on the Z-king's leg. It didn't react at the contact. It stared into nothingness, its jaw shifting ever so slightly, tearing further into its purple flesh. "He's not here to attack. He's here to give you something to run from—when the whittling round begins, I recommend you're all spread out. We don't want a massacre, do we?"

Moth was sure she understood—whittling rounds forced the vessel children and their beasts to fight each other with absolutely no experience, a sure way to eliminate the few that could never do it well in the arena and work the number of them into something manageable.

She didn't want to consider the penalty of losing a whittling round.

"Go!" snapped the man. A low, unearthly growl rumbled in the Z-king's thick throat and slipped through its teeth. "Get out of here! Listen for his signal—then it starts."

Moth didn't know if it was courage or fear that told her it was okay to run this time. She turned and fled, darting in between the rows and columns of vessel children as they broke down and shattered.

* * *

 **Z-king: Z-Rex**

 **Sky-sloth: megath**

 **I think for further down the road, it might be more fun to have you guessing till the AN what certain vivosaurs are based on the names I give. I mean, Sky-sloth was obvious, but I suppose not all of them will be.**

 **Either that or it'll just confuse you. If you have an opinion on this, you should let me know or I'll keep it the same.**

 **Anyway, thanks for reading and leave a review!**

 **-Angel**


	8. Lions Among Sheep

_**The Fall**_

* * *

 **Chapter 8: Lions Among Sheep**

* * *

She remembered running like this before.

But then, she had been aware with every grazing step she took that she was running for her life—just hers, only hers, never mind the brother she had left so quickly in the dust.

And now, she wasn't sure what was pushing her so hard, streaming with the other vessels in the arena tunnels like blood through veins. Surely they all knew they wouldn't die—the tournament hadn't even begun yet; there was no chance of that. Surely they knew that no one racing beside them had any desire to see the others fall and suffer; only for their own families to survive and prosper as best they could in a world that didn't like to see anyone survive and prosper. Surely they knew they were all the same.

Moth knew those things, weaving in and out of bodies she didn't see as living, breathing. In reality, there was not much to run from at all, not among hundreds of others that had lived with her same burden for years and years, that possessed enough combined power to summon Caliosteo's destruction if they would all just stop, breathe, look around, fight.

It hadn't been like that, the first time.

* * *

 _They found it because of Eri._

 _He did have working legs, at some faraway point in his life. It used to be him that collected the bark and stone he used as canvas, the fruit and flower petals for dye. He came home most afternoons a microcosm of nature—twigs in his hair, red and green stained hands, river water soaked into his pants, miscellaneous fragments of color and foliage in his arms._

 _And most afternoons he would take his haul straight to his room and hardly leave it for days, sketching trees from memory, birds in flight, the pattern of shadows on their bedroom floor, any image that had stuck with him he felt he had to petrify on something solid, so he'd never lose it._

 _That afternoon, he had pulled her in with him. She liked to marvel at the lack of symmetry in their room – the side that was his was cluttered, colorful; the stone walls were streaked with mini-paintings and color tests, and her side contained a bed and nothing more. Up until that day, adopting any hobby or pastime like that had seemed futile to her; sad and pointless. Eri had never been like that._

" _Moth," he said seriously, looking her straight in the eyes. Their room had no door, but it was the most private space in their home. Upstairs was too close to the rest of town. Abel was lying sick in the room he shared with Cain—but he never liked to open his eyes, and you never knew if he was awake or asleep._

" _Eri," she whispered back, copying his tone._

" _I think you should come with me the next time I go out for supplies."_

 _So she did._

 _But that time, he didn't go for the stream near home where the flowers grew, or the grove of dead trees north of town where he collected most of his bark. He went south. Often Moth had seen townspeople walk on the southern trails early in the morning, always alone, but always more than one each time she had leaned against the tiny window in her room and watched._

 _She had kept to the trees and thick undergrowth that morning because Eri did, slinking with him in the darkest green of the shadows, never letting a drop of gray sunlight touch their skin._

 _They passed a large, turquoise lake, a silver layer of refracted light glittering on its surface. It almost blinded her to the large and misshapen rock she could see protruding from the earth on the far bank, surrounded by mangroves._

 _The trees thickened as they trekked on, that morning. They got taller, darker, more unfamiliar, roped together with tangles of vines. The sun climbed higher. The world began to feel surreal and so much larger than she'd ever thought before. Something told her not to speak, not till they got where they were going._

 _She held her tongue at the daunting cliff face that soon loomed before them, the hidden snaking path Eri took to scale it. She didn't remark as the ground got further and further away, as they climbed so high they became level with the sun._

 _And at the top, more trees. A "jungle", she later learned, filled with a chorus of harmonized bird whistles and rustling leaves and the shrieks of creatures unknown._

 _Then, the stone juggernaut, sealed onto the ground in a dark, warm clearing across a river like it had sprouted there. It must've had roots._

 _Eri guided her to some low-growing ferns, pushed her into the undergrowth, told her to wait—she did, and soon saw what she expected to see: a few familiar faces from her village emerging the way she and Eri had come and climbing the steps to the stone pyramid like they'd done it a thousand times before, and others coming from the eastern direction, people she'd never seen in her life._

 _They gathered inside. Eri led her up the steps, forced her against the outside wall, whispered, "If you're quiet, you can hear them."_

 _Moth heard them._

 _By following a lone woman in the woods he'd recognized from their village, Eri had stumbled upon not only the stone pyramid, but also what was presumably the only anti-King rebel organization across all of Caliosteo._

 _It welcomed the two of them with open arms, the day they finally decided to reveal themselves—though, like the rest of them, they had fashioned hoods out of hide to wear over their heads and hide what they could of their faces during the meetings. In the months she and Eri attended their gatherings, they never learned a single name of the hundred or so that were usually present._

 _Their activities were minimal—during meetings they discussed in low voices the nature of the government's corruption, the way troops in one member's village had been denied food for days simply because they had no vessel child; how palace soldiers had completely taken over trade operations between Ribular and Ilium and that those poor fish-eaters must be starving to death over there, especially in the winters when the oceans are barren; the way one scarred older woman had been near beaten to death a while back because she had been too sick to meet the birth quota when it was assigned, eighteen years ago._

 _And outside the meetings—the goal was simply to spread the rebels' influence, and do it in such a way that no palace member ever caught wind, and no village councilman that knew would have even an iota of incentive to expose them. Eri and Moth were warned over and over to stay out of that business. Far too dangerous for children of barely twelve years, especially vessels._

 _So they did—they stayed out of it. Cain never knew, Sage never knew, Abel certainly never knew. It was common for vessel children to want to get away, to prefer solitude, to spend hours among nature rather than voices. There was nothing suspicious about them, and as far as they could tell, nothing suspicious about the nameless few they watched leave town certain days at dawn and return by noon with jugs of water or bags of gathered berries or firewood. No, it was never their village that tipped off the higher authorities; the blood of all those dead was never on their hands._

 _In the last meeting, one man snapped._

 _He tore off his hood to reveal a young but wizened face, smooth of wrinkles but cracked by stress—his sudden motion jarred everyone, a break in the streaming stillness that commanded most rebel gatherings. "I'm sick of it," he said flatly. His black eyes were piercing and there was nothing familiar there._

 _He backed away and commanded the attention of everyone in the room—his hand raised, fingers spread wide, a silent rallying cry. "Standing by. Watching the world be poisoned like this, with people like that who think everything is owed to them—sick of it."_

 _Murmuring, shifting—but sounds of agreement, encouragement. This is what they needed, Moth had thought, someone strong enough to push them from cowering within the fortified walls of the pyramid, from whispering to only the most trusted loved ones about the revolution that had to come about._

" _Talking does no good, not like this."_

" _He's right. Taking action, that's the only way anything changes," another voice piped up, a man doing nothing to disguise his voice. The hood came off. He had a strong face too, a heavy set to his jaw and brow, a powerful, unfaltering gleam in his eyes, and it was in their faces that Moth found more hope that something would change than in anything anyone had ever said at the gatherings._

 _Even the words that followed did not compare._

" _Overthrow the King."_

" _Set up a new government, no more monarchy."_

" _No more tyranny."_

" _Tell everyone we know that the rebellion is real."_

" _If they have hope, they'll rise up, they'll fight."_

" _Kill the King."_

" _If there's hope, it lies in the vessels."_

 _Moth's eyes flew wide and she backed up against Eri at those words, feeling the prick of a hundred sets of eyes as they bore into she and her brother—yet she was rescued—_

" _But how? How do we 'take action'?"_

 _She noticed with unease the way the black-eyed man still had his hand spread in the air, like a signal she didn't know how to interpret, something that must've made sense to someone who was not her._

 _The strong-faced man was watching him closely._

" _It's very simple," he called, making sure his voice would carry everywhere in the room, unlike the weak candlelight at the center that barely permeated the dark._

 _But it was not so dark that Moth couldn't see the way his smile turned sinister._

" _You have a plan?" a woman asked, losing the low edge she'd forced her voice to take on in this room, among these people._

" _I'll take that," someone muttered, and Moth felt it, Eri felt it, the shiver of hope that coursed through them all, the spark of righteous energy igniting in her chest. The black-eyed man had been waiting for that._

 _His hand snapped shut into a fist made of stone, and something inside Moth jolted. The sound of sharpened metal pulled out of a sheath seemed to come from everywhere at once till she realized that it did, and those were swords flashing in her peripheral vision—_

 _Eri's voice in her ear: "Run."_

 _She didn't see or hear the blades cutting through flesh but she smelled the blood and felt the aftermath. The first scream was at her back when she bolted, and then a chorus of inhuman sounds rising behind her as she fled, as the hooded soldiers lying in wait revealed themselves, lions among sheep._

 _In her fear she was invincible and unthinking, and her steps were so fast and light that she hardly touched the ground, breaking into the meek pseudo-daylight of the jungle outside and barreling for the thick cover of trees, running and dodging under vines, weaving through trees, cursing herself when she felt her legs begin to tire and go numb, when she felt tears prick at the corner of her eyes at the horror of the world she lived in and the immutable inevitability of blade-wielding soldier at her back—_

 _When she saw the tiny stone well in the ground, almost invisible behind a pair of ensconcing bushes, it was instinct that pushed her inside it, the animalistic instinct buried deep within her that relished the comfort of warm, dark spaces._

 _And inside it she found herself alone, weak. She felt warmth, but it came from the red dripping down her arm; and it was dark, but only because her eyes were closed and she never wanted to open them again, not in this world._

 _She waited, still alone, till another kind of darkness took over. In her hysteria she thought it was death._

* * *

Moth shoved the others aside when she could, leapt over one or two that had fallen, forcing herself faster, faster still—she burst through the arch into warmth and sunlight that still weren't enough to melt the chill still grasping her heart from the memory of knife teeth and dead, soulless eyes.

She skipped steps when she could, bounding down the cracked stone stairs onto hard-packed earth, feeling the crowd break away beside her. The sound of footsteps and frantic voices whistled in her ears. Flashes of light erupted in her peripheral vision, then one so close she felt the white heat against her face and her hand flew to the pocket that held her pumice stone. Sparks darted between her fingers.

 _Tyko._

She skidded to a sudden halt near the cliff's edge. For a moment the sound of his name had flooded her wild unthinking and took control—where was he? Was he the small dark-haired boy she'd pushed against the wall, out of her way? The cowering figure she'd leaped over in the halls?

No. Tyko wouldn't cower. He wouldn't be pushed aside.

But none of the vessels breaking away from the archway had his face, his quick and peculiar way of moving. He was not among them, and for a moment she felt utterly weak, utterly alone, doomed to cower and be pushed aside—

The electricity trying to scale her hand out of the pocket suddenly popped and crackled; she tore it out, watching faint steam curl from its porous white surface as it grew hotter, too hot to hold.

On instinct she tossed it.

In the air it suddenly blazed white, a metamorphic silhouette of a misshapen sun that sprouted and bloomed like a flower. The tide in her head swallowed the beach and she gasped at the cold flooding her body, ducking her head till the light died. It was nothing like the sinister glow that'd birthed the guard's zombified killing machine, back in the arena. Arashi's light felt warm and powerful—a sunrise, but the sun was close enough to touch.

She looked again when shade fell over her, from the darkened form of the giant Sky-horse crouched there. His fur whipped wildly in the wind as it picked up, his blue eyes narrowed with purpose. Moth felt a tugging in her chest, watching his odd paws shift the earth beneath him, the muscles rippling in his legs—more than anything, he wanted to run, a desire she felt burn through her like silent fire.

A growl trembled in his throat. The end of his muzzle was close enough to her face to touch. His narrow, pointed ears—each longer than her arm—seemed to twitch at every noise, no matter how faint. Dust clouds swirled between his restless paws.

"Tyko," she whispered to him, pulling herself away from his eyes and searching among the small shapes racing away and the writhing bodies of beasts large and small and unfamiliar to her as they broke from shells of light. But she saw the glinting of iron claws, fangs that shimmered like rows of knives, heard the savage grunting and snarling of anachronistic creatures that could tear her to pieces like nothing—and here they were in the open, broad morning sunlight, just beyond the shadow of the sandstone arena's western wall. And Tyko was nowhere.

Arashi snarled—it was a deep, airy sound, like nothing she'd ever heard.

From the arena, the stream of fleeing vessels had near stopped. Still Tyko was nowhere.

"Okay," Moth said. "We run." She turned to Arashi and grabbed for his left foreleg—she didn't flinch at the static rippling in his fur as she bunched it in her fists. The Sky-horse dropped his shoulders immediately and Moth scrambled up onto his back as quickly as she could manage, feeling the rise and fall of his breath, the way the hair on her arms and head began to rise as she buried her hands in the dark fur of his mane, the shifting of his bones and muscles as he stood again.

From his first step, Moth decided she never wanted to go back to her own legs again. Arashi was aware of his own power—he knew he could sprint from here to the cliff's faraway forest beyond the arena and hardly tire; perhaps he could even leap the distance to the ground below the cliff and glide on the winds he commanded so the fall would feel like nothing.

In the distance, an unearthly noise—the Z-king's shriek. The whittling round had started and Arashi began to run.

Moth gasped when she felt herself slipping, locking her legs in place, pressing the side of her head into his mane and gripping harder. Her hair clung to her face the way it did in winter when the air was choked of any moisture. Beneath her, she felt his shoulder-blades grinding back and forth, the impacts of his paws on hard-packed earth—in his sprint he spent more time flying than he did touching the ground, but there was no panic in his motion, simply speed and confidence and power.

They rounded the sandstone arena, heading for where the space between its wall and the sheer edge thinned out to almost nothing, a snaking path where the rocks were loose and unstable—she would have been anxious if not for the adamant swirling currents in her mind that carried away and drowned any negative thought that tried to piece itself together.

A sharp-edged bark behind her. The sound was so odd and out of place that she risked falling and whirled around.

A doglike creature was suddenly sprinting in their wake, covered in blood-red fur and deep black stripes across its paws and muzzle. Moth's eyes fell on its white teeth, the ground its claws tore up in its mad dash for Arashi, and the small boy clinging to its back as it ran, locking eyes with her and glaring.

A Flame-wolf—small but tough fire-spitting creatures that tended not to show mercy. It would lunge for them when it could, sink its jaws into Arashi's back and grind them against his spine, unbalance them and leap off the moment they started to fall, if it didn't decide it would rather ravage them with fire and tear apart what remained with its claws.

The thought sparked an unfamiliar sort of fury in her.

"This doesn't end till the numbers fall," the boy shouted, eyes trained on her.

"Yeah," she murmured.

Something dark flashed in the corner of her eye, something hanging in the sky. It tipped to the side and its blackened wings unfurled, its bright cobalt eyes gleamed. A Z-wing, carrying a guard on its back, the same sort of creature they'd sent after the girl who ran.

The guard was watching them, she knew.

Arashi leapt across a hole in the path, paws scrabbling for grip on the other side.

Surely the guards wouldn't let a vessel child die.

Arashi felt every thought that passed through her mind—it was a mind that no longer belonged to her, not as long as he existed physically. He sensed her intentions, the quick flash of ideas and conclusions that led to what he did next.

Moth watched the Flame-wolf pause only slightly, bunching his legs to make the jump across the gap. Arashi used her sight—he slammed his shoulder into the rising arena wall beside them with such force that everything shuddered, Moth cried out and clung on harder, the Flame-wolf gave a yelp as the rock it stood on crumbled and fell the dizzying distance to the forest canopies below. Unbalanced, it leapt back onto wider ground, narrowly avoiding tumbling off the edge. The boy's eyes had gone wide with horror.

Arashi recovered from the impact like it hadn't happened, putting on more speed as the path below them broadened and they emerged onto a ledge, overlooking the wide plateau between the arena and the thick woods farther out.

"Go," Moth said, but she didn't have to—Arashi leapt over the edge and the wind blazed alongside them like it was trying to keep them airborne, though it wasn't quite enough. They slammed into the ground and it crumbled beneath his paws. He kept on, out in the open under a sky empty of clouds or anything but muted morning light and dark blemishes where the Z-wings circled. His legs felt unsteady now, and Moth sensed his rippling confusion, like now that he stopped to think about it, it'd been so many millions of years since last he'd ran so fast; now that time had passed and his bones were different than they'd been, running again was difficult to get the hang of. "Keep going," Moth whispered, training her eyes at the space between his rabbit-like ears where the trees were sprouting, up on top of a short craggy cliff.

His steps were uneven. They flew at speeds faster than Moth had ever gone before; the wind that whipped at her was frigid and biting—she willed him to calm, grabbed for the intangible currents in her mind and pulled them to a halt, slowed her breathing as much as she could bear. Like a switch she could feel the confidence flooding back, the weight evening out beneath her as they traversed the plateau.

Their vast space was almost empty. To her far left, a fight had broken out—a devilish striped creature lunged for the skies on powerful back legs, jaws snapping shut on open air as a tall-crested beast feinted out of his reach on awkward patterned wings. The winged beast warbled and screeched flew in furious circles, whipping at the Flame-beast as it spat red-hot embers that fell and sizzled on the stone below.

Moth didn't want their attention—she urged Arashi faster. Her heart dropped when the devil carnivore whipped its head towards her. She saw the intent in its eyes across the distance—the Sky-horse was the easier target.

" _Go!"_ she cried again. No way it could follow them over the ledge—besides, vessels would want to stay out of the woods with Flame-beasts.

Arashi leapt the last of the distance, forcing his enormous body up the sloping rock wall, searching frantically for footholds. Moth felt them go vertical. She clung desperately, eyes on the red-and-white Flame-beast as it raced for them and the speck on its back that was human. Its teeth were yellowed, deadly sharp.

The distance to the ground stretched further—but it could still reach them if it jumped.

Bolting pain suddenly shot through her; Arashi yowled. Barely she clung on.

Above, a reptilian face eyed them from over the ledge; blue-green, small, angry—Sea-spike. It had kicked rocks over the edge into Arashi's face and his pain had registered inside her somehow. Now were trapped between the Sea-spike bearing down on them and the Flame-beast as it closed in; panic fluttered somewhere at the base of her thoughts and she wasn't sure whose it was.

The Sea-spike gave a whine and stomped at more loose rocks; Arashi ducked his head, trying to flatten his vertical body against the stone wall.

 _Loose rocks again._

She checked a second time—Z-wings circled nearby enough. Still watching.

Arashi lunged suddenly; the Sea-spike yelped and tried to dodge to the side as his paws flashed over the edge—it was close to the real edge now, the one that fell away to an empty chasm of sky and the treetops far, far below. A deadly drop, if the guards truly would let anyone die.

Jaws clamped on empty air below them. Arashi gave a last burst of strength, even more static coursing through his body, and careened onto flat ground, driving his momentum hard into the Sea-spike's flank. Moth heard the sound of rippling electricity, of breath knocked from ancient lungs, of a heavy spike-tail swishing in vain, the noiseless panic of the white-blue creature as it toppled off the real edge, the human cry that belonged to the second face that fell with it—

Arashi did not wait. The Z-wings in the sky did not move to save them, not even the beast's stone as it retreated for its last moments.

"No," Moth breathed in what felt like silence.

Into the trees they fled.

* * *

 **In a vastly unprecedented turn of events, I'm alive!**

 **Flame-wolf: andrarch**

 **Z-wing: z-ptera**

 **Sea-spike: jiango**

 **Also featuring a random s-raptor and jara.**

 **One thing I DID do with my time for the almost-year I was gone dealing with life stuff was get about 80% of this story's outline finished, and most of that work happened in the past month so it'll be done soon. At the very least, part one is all outlined. I THINK there will be three parts. Maybe four. I've got a bit more outline-wrangling to do.**

 **Oh, and that OC thing till I post chapter ten is still going.**

 **Anyway, I would absolutely appreciate reviewing and following and favoriting if you would be so kind, and I'll try to have chapter nine up in about a week.**

 **-Angel**


	9. Rising Sun

**_The Fall_**

* * *

 **Chapter 9: Rising Sun**

* * *

She had pressed her face into his fur, pretending the static crackling against her cheeks was warmth, not sharp and biting; and that the phantom pulse she felt far below her own chest was there for the same reason skinny dark-haired girls were allowed to fall off cliffs and die at the apex of one long, cold crescendo of terror.

Arms grabbed for her—stiff, brittle corpse arms with needle nails arcing away from strong columns sprouting everywhere and tearing up the ground with their roots—trees, trees, they were trees and branches whipping at them and obstructing their path in woody snarls, why had she forgotten what they were called? Why did her thoughts feel so slippery and far away—

 _NO._

Then no thoughts, only a word. Her mind was drowning in an ocean of _NO_ and odd currents were rippling through it, latching onto words and pulling them free—Arashi was there again, suddenly more present in her head than she was, trying to attach sound to meaning in a way he had never thought necessary in the life he first lived, but suddenly thought more than necessary now, to submerge her in a word she understood at least until the thin fog of madness had gone for good.

Meanwhile he kept running. This was like the first day they had met, bolting through thick forest, afraid of the thing on their heel that hadn't been each other. His flanks slammed into trees, branches whipped at them and curled around Arashi's limbs, odd shrieks and screams sieved through the woods far to the right—

"Hide, hide, go hide," Moth whispered, and her voice was weak and drowned by the unsteady thumping of the Sky-horse's paws and the sounds of wood and earth giving way to them and—

Something shrieked, so close the hair on her arms stood on end.

Arashi stumbled into sunlight, letting out an involuntary yelp when he caught sight of the ledge only steps ahead of them. He skidded, scrambled back, but the grass had thinned out and grew only in the cracks in the slippery stones—behind them, a snarl, maybe far enough that whatever was on their tail hadn't seen them yet, but close enough that it had heard. Arashi's paws flailed for grip but he careened over the edge, headfirst. For a moment, Moth was weightless, and she held her breath and braced for the impact—when it came, it seemed to hit her through her chest, knocking away whatever air she'd managed to keep in her lungs. Arashi crumpled against rock with an audible wince and scrabbled to the darkened shadow beneath the overhang.

Moth choked as loudly as she dared, clinging to his back and trying to breathe again.

 _SHHHH._

She froze at the hissing in her head.

He was barely breathing; beneath her, his back was still. Moth curled his fur into her fingers and grit her teeth at the static shock. Her mouth was open and no air came or went. She followed Arashi's eyes—his neck was craned ever so slightly, angry blue eyes fixed at what was above them. She looked.

There was the jagged edge of the rock wall, arcing above their breathless bodies, and then trees, some pieces of sky. It was all still, and silent.

As she watched, a spray of tiny pebbles skidded over the edge.

She ducked onto his back again and her pulse fluttered wildly between them.

Something above shuffled heavy feet against the overhang; Arashi forced them further into the rock. He was still unbreathing, and Moth felt the fear flowing through him like a river, taking every rational thought into its current and submerging it.

The river began to overflow. Moth looked up again—and this time, deep red monster eyes stared back.

She took a breath that shuddered and her eyes traced over the black devil horns longer than her arm arcing out from its face, its parted knife teeth. Her heart pounded in her ears, because a face like that should only exist in nightmares, or in the moving shapes she thought she saw in the dark.

It jerked back from the edge and there was a sound so out of place there, on the overhang—a young girl's shriek of excitement, and then a silvery blur over her head as the huge, heavy creature launched itself over the edge and landed flat on feet half as long as her body, tense and almost crumpled by the impact, but the packed earth seemed to absorb the shock on its own and ricochet the energy back up through its long, slender hind legs. It flicked a massive silver tail, regaining its balance, and rounded on them: huddled pathetically under the rock wall.

Moth stared at it—and before she noticed the little girl clinging to its back, she eyed the gray and silver mosaic pattern on its body, the bony teal studs trailing down its back and neck, the blunted snout, the thick bull horns curving over its red, human eyes, the tiny arms that clung to its chest, useless and tucked out of the way.

"Hi, you!" The young blond-haired girl on its back had regained her bearings—she sat on her knees in a white cloth dress, waving at Moth and wearing a huge grin.

"Oh," Moth whispered.

"I knew you'd meet Dusty someday. Here he is!"

Dusty the Earth-bull let out a low snarl, working his thick claws into the dirt.

Hadn't Cain drilled her on element matchups? Once, years ago. They'd been ingrained in her ever since—air beats water, water beats fire, fire beats earth.

Earth beats air.

"That thing is going to kill us," Moth murmured. Arashi's muscles were tensing so hard they had become stone beneath her.

"Now charge, Dusty!"

Dusty charged.

He moved so fast; Moth's breath caught in her throat when he became a silver smear in her vision; his claws tore the hard-packed earth into dust clouds that blurred the ground he touched and she fought the urge to leap off Arashi's back and run for her life.

"Move move _move_ ," she mumbled, locked where she sat by a strange instinct that forced her to trust him.

Dusty's jaws gaped; blade fangs caught the light and gleamed and the heat of his breath graced her face in the split second he was close enough to lunge and clamp down—Arashi shot from beneath the stone with a power she hadn't realized he'd coiled in his limbs to set free at only the right moment.

Moth held on tight and they whisked from beneath the silver tower. She felt the tremors in his legs and the weakness that pressured him to collapse again. Her eyes were still locked on the Earth-bull and he whipped around, grinding his jaws, disappointed they had closed on empty air.

"Oh, you're fast," the little girl exclaimed, pressed flat against his back. "Again!"

Arashi was frozen and his eyes drew wider with every heavy stride Dusty took in their direction; he shook his head, backed away, whirled to the side and let the Earth-bull barrel past towards the trees encroaching on the clearing's edge.

Static rippled through his fur.

Dusty turned on his heel, snarling savagely. His red eyes were slits.

Moth wondered if Arashi could deliver an electric shock, straight into his face.

She felt him protest the idea, pacing where he stood, eyeing Dusty warily for his next move.

Moth had a vision of thunder, a white column thicker than a tree lancing from the sky to stab the earth—she saw how the ground absorbed the power so easily. It would take something like that to even faze him.

She saw the electricity building in his fur, little white sparks leaping here and there, avoiding her or fizzling out with barely a pinprick of pain where they pierced her skin. They needed more than that; a lot more.

Dusty took a slow step forwards. Arashi let a growl rumble in his chest and he crouched, halfway between pouncing and fleeing. Moth had been distracted, briefly, by a rustling of leaves and undergrowth to her left. Yet nothing was there.

Arashi leaped forward, halving the distance, and Moth let out a breath at the terror splitting her heart when Dusty darted forward to meet them. The sound of his jaws snapping shut less than an arm's length above her back made her cry out.

Arashi weaved under his head, bunching his legs and leaping to headbutt the base of his neck. The Earth-bull let out a savage wheeze; his jaw grazed her back as he scrambled away, gaping.

"Oh, you'll regret that," the girl shouted. Her hand was rubbing against her beast's neck and Dusty had them fixed in a murderous gaze, a human expression on a creature that was anything but.

White bolts were crackling up and down Arashi's body and she felt them hit her with physical force: warm, dull stabs in her side like he was trying to throw her off.

 _GO._

But it was her own voice in her head, the same she had used earlier as Arashi fled across the plateau, harnessed and thrown back at her this time.

More bolts, so hot they began to hurt. Dusty was leaning forward ever so slowly like he was going to fall, his jaw trembling—

 _GO!_

He lunged. Moth leaped from his back and knocked into the ground so hard she thought her vision went black; but maybe that was from the hot-knife pain lancing through her shoulders—she came to, crumpled on her side, to watch Dusty land a crushing bite across Arashi's back. Moth screamed; Arashi howled and writhed, the bolts in his fur whip-cracking between him and the ground. A white-hot electric blade suddenly curled up his forelimb and struck Dusty in the eye, who shrieked but didn't let go.

His grip had been loosened, though. Arashi ripped himself away and Moth gasped when more pain clawed its way up her back. Arashi sprinted away, leaping vast stretches of distance over the earth as he charged again towards the overhang. The Earth-bull snarled and nearly threw himself to the ground trying to follow, stumbling half-blind in Arashi's electrified wake.

And rustling—a sound so soft and slight it was nothing against the ripping earth beneath their feet, the jagged and monstrous breathing, their otherworldly shrieks and cries; yet still it fluttered against her left eardrum and she whipped around, staring into the rising wall of foliage and wood to her back. Leaves shifted so precisely and individually that it couldn't have been wind. No, there was something hiding there.

Her mind grew warier with every moment her eyes were off Arashi and she turned again, still gripped in the phantom pain trailing down her body and dragged down by an insufferable exhaustion that was not her own.

Dusty was charging like a real bull, his jaw hanging open like Arashi's bolt had petrified the muscles in his face, his black savage horns reaching out like arms. Arashi crouched, his back two paws pressed against the sloping overhang wall, his neck weaving as he searched for a way out this time; Dusty's footsteps were a thunderous heartbeat and she felt it like she was a spitting distance from where he touched down against his own element.

One more stride and he was on top of him, letting out a gape-mouthed roar painted with the timbre of the little girl's excited shriek; Arashi feinted and leapt right; Dusty's neck jerked like a viper's to meet him, slicing off the escape with his bull horns, sweeping them back with the speed and force of a sonic boom. Skin ground against stone, bone into flesh, and Arashi was pinned—Moth felt the impact and crumpled again, trying to keep the air in her lungs this time. Arashi roared and it was a hissing, breathy sound like a snake's voice, and he crackled white like a yellow-blue storm cloud, enveloped in dormant lightning like a second hide.

He writhed, Dusty snarled and ground his skull into the Sky-horse's chest, and Moth saw stone and dust particles whipping from the ground and rock wall and enveloping them both in a thin haze, an earthen inferno, and Moth was suffocated by what felt like needle blades piercing her skin and dust drowning her lungs. "Now, do it now!" she shrieked, and he did, falling still as the rock he was pinned against. The lightning in him let loose.

And yet—though there was a storm raging, born of a living beast and not a cloud, darkening the clear skies above and robbing the world of light to force it all into one solitary bolt, thicker than a tree—she turned her head away once more, towards the shaded undergrowth concealing in it something that did not want to be seen. The world went gray like it did when storms raged at noon and the sound of it cracking echoed behind her, and deep in the dark spaces between leaves she watched green eyes glint, in the savagely humanoid way beasts' eyes do.

Bolts of power arced through her veins so suddenly she gasped; and electrified, she stood again, turning on her heel.

The Earth-bull writhed on his side in the dust, rubbing his skin into dirt like it would ease the pain; white sparks clung to him and he wailed—barely a spitting distance away, the little girl crouched and was breathing fast, flinching, twitching, unaware that her hair was standing on end. The streaks on the simple white of her dress told Moth she had been knocked aside, maybe soon enough to be spared from the worst of the lightning, or maybe not; maybe she would have been Moth's second human victim of the day, maybe her heart was juddering in her chest and ready to stop. Moth had so easily forgotten the human nature bound behind the glare of eyes that had last seen millions of years ago and the living, breathing reason that it was there at all.

Arashi. He stood, barely, heaving gulps of air like his living storm had burned it all away, beneath the overhang. His fur stood on end and his eyes were wild, exhausted and brutish at once. His ears twitched madly, his tail flicked nervously, because he knew he had not won. He had used everything in him and he had not won.

Dusty flailed, working his powerful back legs under him again—and he rose like it was the earth pushing against him, not him against the earth. He shook his head in a dizzy fit, twitching, flinching, breathing raggedly. He eyed Arashi, strides away.

"Circle," Moth whispered under her breath, and the word echoed in her mind and in the one hid behind it, with meaning rather than sound.

Between them flashed the mental image of green predator eyes lying in wait.

Arashi understood.

He began to pace.

Step by step, Moth closed the distance between them, watching the Earth-bull react. He had no plan of attack; nothing but the centuries upon centuries of instinct coiled in him, and the human mind that would have harnessed that instinct and channeled it, were she not so stunned with pain that wasn't her own, were she not so young and in so far over her head. But Dusty knew this game. How long had it been since he'd played it last, with other prey—small thick-headed plant eaters that wouldn't give up, enormous earth-shaking beasts he'd caught alone that always almost won in the end? It had not been long enough for him to forget.

He mirrored Arashi, and began to pace on the invisible axis between them. This was a battle of wills now, not strength.

He wasn't aware, but it was also a battle of wits—Moth's own against that of a creature with half its mind compromised.

Arashi moved along the rock face and Moth paced at his side, eyeing Dusty intently as he neared the edge of undergrowth, noticing the uncertainty in his step as he tried to determine when to lunge again. Arashi feigned strength in his walk, held his snout level with Moth's head like he could hear her more clearly like that, or see the image of eyes in her mind with more clarity.

Almost there.

Dusty sauntered close enough to the tree line to brush it with his tail, ever so close to the bush that held the green stalking eyes, and Moth's heart was in her throat.

Nothing happened.

Maybe she imagined those eyes; no, she knew they had bored into her with the sharpness of knives.

Maybe they were no predator's eyes and simply those of a more peaceful sort of hiding beast and the human that guarded the other half of its mind; no, there had been bloodlust there in the green, the natural sort of carnal savagery that was as innate and at home in their gazes as a smile on a human face.

And maybe it was no beast at all. But no—those eyes were not entirely savage, not entirely human either, but of something that could choose both or one or neither.

Moth felt its choice the second it was made, like a tiny bone snapping in her chest.

From the bush it leaped. A piece of the forest itself came alive then, erupting in a shower of leaves to lunge at Dusty like a savage pale tongue, and crocodile jaws snapped open and then shut on the soft flesh of the Earth-bull's neck.

The little girl yelped and her hands flew over her mouth, stifling a high-pitched "No!"

Dusty jerked, snarling and writhing, biting air—the forest creature was immense, bigger than him from the tip of its skinny snout to the tail that flicked behind it, bigger than him from where its thick hind legs scrabbled dirt into mud to the many-colored sail rising on its back.

Sea-spine.

Dusty ripped himself free, Arashi long forgotten—deep red lines traced across his neck.

The Sea-spine did not flinch, but it recoiled out of the way, shifting its massive weight from foot to foot with an energy it shouldn't have had, not with its size. Maroon stripes decorated its long muzzle, skinny arms, nimble feet—mostly it was sand-colored, like its body was bound in thin strips of old parchment. It had a tiny orange crest, and a massive sail on its back like a rising sun—that was the pattern it had, Moth realized—its back was the horizon and the sail was the sun.

In its throat erupted a warbling growl, like it was gargling water.

And behind it there was a boy, barely emerged from the foliage. He was tall, familiar, dark in the face.

"Now take him out, Sunny."

Moth may have imagined the irritation on the Sea-spine's face, because it didn't hesitate and weaved ahead, darting from side to side with impossible agility. Warily, Dusty tried to dodge back and his legs trembled, clumsy and weakened by the lightning that lingered. The little girl watched with awed fear and Moth felt a surge of protective anger, like she wanted to run to her, scoop her off the ground, and get her out of that place. Not that any other place would be better.

She was watching a sort of violence that wasn't supposed to exist in this world—the Sea-spine struck with crocodile fangs and buried them in flesh, then twisted, Dusty swung his horns in vain, writhing in odd desperation that seemed almost human—but hadn't she been living that violence already, an ancient savagery that should've died long ago combined with a power too great for it to withstand?

Nowhere would be better.

Dusty lurched back, scrambled away, suddenly helpless, close enough to the girl to touch her, and the Sea-spine made no move in pursuit.

Above, a shadow passed briefly over the sun. Moth didn't look up this time.

The Sea-spine stiffened and fixed Dusty in its hunter's gaze—it sat far back on its haunches and Dusty stood petrified, no longer a weapon but a silver wall between the little girl and everything else. From the Sea-spine's throat an ocean of violent, venomous water erupted and sprang forth like a cloud, an amorphous shape that blasted into its target at the speed of sound to envelop it and bowl it into the dust.

The sun burned away its remnants fast and then there was nothing left, no ghostly silhouette or shadow, no footprints, just the tiny shape of a girl crouching where he once was and holding a stone.

Moth had held that stone. She knew how warm it felt to touch. She wondered if it was cold now, pressed against her lips like she was whispering to it. If Dusty wasn't dead; if the tournament didn't really force beasts to fight to their deaths, then he was trapped forever in that small granite rock, trapped from her, and there was nothing left of him but the memory.

Flapping wings, directly overhead—Moth watched the Z-wing descend, sickly purple with sprawling red gossamer between the bones of its wings, empty bug eyes bigger than her head and glowing like giant blue coals. It was big. It could stretch its wings almost as long as Arashi's body.

It made no sound and perched on the ground a distance away, folding its wings, falling still like it wasn't alive. Maybe it wasn't.

Two guards slid swiftly off its back, eyeing the girl like prey but moving no closer.

And then—the wailing.

Moth jumped. It was so hard-edged and sudden, no crescendo, just pure grief captured in a sound. She hung over her lap, her hair lank against the dust and shielding her face. She coughed violently and the wail cut off, she choked like she'd swallowed something vile, like she was trying to breathe but there was nothing. And then a sob, inhuman in its volume, its depth.

Moth found her eyes locked with the boy who stood in the shadow of his Sea-spine. It was the boy she had knocked into outside the arena, the one with the proud, angry face that gave away not pride nor anger this time. There was no triumph there, any more than there was for her. How could there be any triumph?

And why hadn't she just run? They could've made it far, far away from here by now, if she would have just come to her senses the moment the Sea-spine surged from the trees. She wouldn't have to be here for this, watching a little girl with only half a mind left scream like the insanity of the sound would fill the void.

Now the Sea-spine eyed her. It gazed Arashi up and down, the wild and instinctive half of its mind unfazed by the constant timbre of sorrow that turned the late morning air cold.

But the boy behind it noticed the guards and the way they watched her, expressionless and still, just waiting.

In the distance, another savage roar sounded, almost lost in the screaming and the distance it traveled. The Sea-spine ducked down suddenly, pressing the bottom of its throat against the ground so the boy could climb up onto its neck.

She thought he looked at her and said, "You're not worth it."

The Sea-spine took off on a half-sprint in the direction of the roar, running like her screams were chasing it out, vanishing again in the hole it'd ripped out between the trees.

Beside her, Arashi collapsed. Moth couldn't move to protest him, to urge they leave, to even sit down beside him. Instead she could do nothing but stare at the heavy rise and fall of his flank and wonder what she would sound like when he was gone, when she felt for the ensconcing wall of her thoughts and touched nothing but an absence of anything—a void through which she would fall forever.

* * *

 **God I should lighten up. I forgot how dark this world actually is.**

 **Earth-bull: carno**

 **Sea-spine: spino**

 **Those two are some personal favorites of mine as dinosaurs. I'm trying to keep their descriptions loyal to their game designs as well as their real-life biology if I can.**

 **Starry's Light—Yeah, lythro's pretty creepy. I did consider using Frontier vivosaurs in this, but decided it wouldn't make sense since they can only revive the dinosaurs/other animals that you can find in Caliosteo. Also I hope it made sense last chapter what was happening with the resistance—some village guards (not from Moth's village) found out about it and snuck in to destroy it, and the rebels weren't planning to kill the vessels and were just throwing some vague ideas around because they were excited. If that was just really unclear I'll go back and fix it. Anyway thanks so much for reviewing; I love reading your comments!**

 **I'm planning to start writing chapter ten on Sunday, to give me some time to focus on other stuff. And up until I post next, you can send over an OC if you've got some cool ideas.**

 **Anyway, thanks for reading! Now go review or something.**

 **-Angel**


	10. The Game

**_The Fall_**

* * *

 **Chapter 10: The Game**

* * *

The world had become a symphony of sounds she'd scarcely or never heard in her life:

There was wind, and the wild whistling of it curving around cliff faces half as high as the clouds; a melody.

The trees caught it and shivered, for the wind was cold to the touch, so high up; a harmony.

And piercing, grating shrieks from anywhere; she would hear them if she focused in any one direction—a warbling cry of a creature she imagined had feathers, long and slender limbs, a narrow snout lined with tiny razor teeth; a rumbling groan of an animal bigger than a house, a whole street of houses, a head many leagues away from the tip of its tail; a guttural roar, a beast not much different in size and brutality than Dusty had been.

Screams, too—she could marvel at how close to human they could sound, or how close to monstrous the vessels could be in their terror.

Yet beneath the overhang she had found some kind of peace.

Above her the sky was blue, and vast, and cloudless; a cold and lonely sort of blue, and it evoked no fear in her now. Trees stretched up from the clearing's edge, from where the jut gave way to it, leafy arms breaking the forested horizons into rustling fragments. A deep, almost metaphysical exhaustion was rooting her there, laying back against the rise and fall of Arashi's flank, and her breathing matched his, her eyes rested half-closed, her lips parted and were dried by the wind, leafy pieces of shadow darting and dissolving over her face, her arms, her bare legs. She could imagine herself somewhere else, if she wanted to. She didn't.

There was a point that the little girl's cries muffled and died out, and any remnants of the noise were carried away with the sound of undead flapping wings, clinking armor. The Z-wing and guards had left them there, still, basked in the phantom ebbing pain that clung to them both.

Moth was awake in a dream. The fire of Arashi's pain was numb and warm.

She thought about life. Some people fought for it so hard, she'd seen—Cain, Eri, Tyko, Arashi, in their own ways, everyone she'd ever known, everyone she'd ever seen.  
Had they ever laid beneath a naked sky like her, she wondered, had they felt another mind press up against their own and understand it more deeply than they could, had they been so overcome with pain and exhaustion that there was nothing left that wasn't burned away but the capacity to feel happy—

No. Happy didn't suit them. Any of them. It didn't suit her. It didn't suit this world.

This life. _I don't need it like you do._

When her eyes closed, she knew that she would sleep forever, and it was all she could've ever wanted.

And the symphony shattered with a noise so discordant and otherworldly it made her want to cry, so loud but so far away in the empty space it cut through to reach her; her eyes drew further open with every modicum of volume it gained, the ground was suddenly gone beneath her and she fell skywards, her thoughts ripping through layer after layer of numb, dreamlike apathy, and the ocean in her head that had been flat as glass was a torrent she was sure would rip her apart—

She screamed and it was a sound that could've come from the mouth of any creature alive that day that had been dead for millennia, and it would've been the same.

The noise was gone, and she was left alone.

Between the two of them flashed an image of a zombified creature standing as tall as a house with eyes that burned, ducked into the shadow the sandstone arena cast upon it. It was the Z-king's cry, almost the same as the sound that had started the whittling round half the morning ago. No—it was the same.

Moth forced herself to her feet, shivering violently in the silence that cowered in the wake of such a sound. She was afraid, she realized, but not of the Z-king, not of the death she had witnessed.

She turned to Arashi. He had risen. Sparks of white prickled in his fur, and he looked straight at her, and in her mind flashed an image of her own face. The colors were wrong, mismatched, too dull, but it was her.

She was afraid of what had almost killed her, the dull and soothing apathy she had mistaken for happiness, the liquid feeling in her veins that had been so heavy it would've drowned her there and she would've felt nothing but the lovely dark that pulled them both under.

There had been nothing like that in her before, no feeling or lack thereof so powerful it could stop her heart.

Arashi gazed at her with a sort of flat urgency.

"Would I have died?" she rasped, so weakly the words sounded like wind. "Would we have died?"

Arashi tilted his head.

"That doesn't make sense," she said. "Are we all so ready to die that it only takes a thought?"

There was almost nothing between them now, no rippling of water, no false-color images.

"Or was it you?" Moth could not stop shivering. "Arashi, are you dying?"

A growl rumbled within him.

 _NO._

It was the same as he had spoken before, the echoing noise in her mind when it threatened to give way to whatever downward spiral lead to madness.

His limbs were trembling, she realized. It was so subtle it appeared the wind was only rustling his fur.

"Oh," she whispered. She stepped forward tentatively, instinctively, aware in the back of her mind that the symphony of these woods had not yet picked up again. Her hand reached for him. With effort he came forward to meet her, a vast creature she didn't think could scare her if he tried, and he pressed his heavy muzzle with an unexpected force into her palm. She gasped at the weight of it, the fizzling electricity against her skin, and then the dull flash that turned his silhouette white, a reverse shadow eaten away by light, and he was gone, and a small pumice stone rested in her hand.

The whittling round was over.

Somehow she knew: the Z-king would scream again, and then again, until every surviving vessel had returned to the arena.

With a burst of energy, she made for the face of the overhang and began to scale it, determined to prevent the Z-king from breaking a little more of the world with its voice.

* * *

The way back was simpler.

Through the woods from which she had came, towards the cliff where bad things happened, then into step with a small group of nameless vessels she didn't recognize, heading back to the arena. It seemed they all understood the Z-king's call with no explanation. Moments ago they could have been fighting each other to the death, on the backs of savage beasts with bloodlust in their eyes or cowering in the shadows of creatures ready to give their lives for nothing; but now they moved as a unit, thankful in their wide-eyed-ness that they had survived this day, and that they had a chance at the endless months to come. Moth felt at home with them, and no one spoke. She followed them into a shallower path down the cliff that fed into the plateau. Across an expanse of rock was the pale-colored juggernaut; the arena, and she felt them on edge with every step, wondering when the Z-king would scream again for the stragglers.

Across the plateau, others moved. Some ran. One or two flew on the backs of winged beasts, no arrogance in their eyes as the traversed the plateau in mere moments. Moth looked—for a small dark-haired boy, a raptor-sized Flame-flight circling somewhere nearby, but there was nothing, and the seed of worry in her took hold and sprouted.  
It grew with every step.

On the plateau's other side, they worked their way up a narrow slope to the cliff's edge, where they'd be close enough to touch the arena's foundations and cling to its side as they traced their paths back to the looming stairs where they'd entered, picking a safer way this time because they weren't afraid for their lives, not at this moment, breathing heavy sighs of relief when they broke into the cold, stale darkness of the tunnels where they all remembered sprinting in a blind panic hours ago.

They entered the vast bowl of the arena's center, flooded with noon light this time instead of shaded in a soothing lavender.

In the middle was an uglier, evil sort of purple. The Z-beast had not moved, but it slumped, its snout near grazing the brushed dust of the arena floor, like the light was sucking the energy from it, like its scream had been of pain and nothing more. Beside it, several Z-wings crouched. Moth noticed the guards pacing at their feet, the small group of vessels sitting there with heads bowed or buried in their hands. They were all silent.

Where the walls of the arena sloped down in squared-off increments, steps or seats or both, scattered groups of vessels huddled. It seemed there was a choice—the steps or the Z-beasts, but the way those sad kids crouched in the shadow of beasts rotting where they stood made it seem like there had been no choice at all, not for them.

There were more guards directly ahead. Moth followed the stream of vessels towards them, gripping her stone till she could feel the electricity like warmth against her skin.  
She stopped when she reached them. This was neither the Sky-sloth man nor the one that had released the Z-king. This was a woman, too tall, hair cut short like a man's.

She glared at her expectantly, with hard, black eyes. In her hand was a leather-bound notebook.

Moth tried, "Moth of Null-king?"

The woman gave a slow shake of her head. "No, _Moth_. Tell me your beast. Troops don't matter anymore."

She said it like they never would again.

"Sky-horse."

The woman nodded, a languid, absent motion of her head, flipping back in her notebook and glancing down at the stone in Moth's hand before drawing a quick strike on the page. "Congratulations for clearing round zero."

She said it like an insult.

Moth left her eagerly, heading straight to the left where the others were gathering. They were silent. They watched her, turning small stones over in their hands; they looked absently towards the pseudo-horizon of the arena's edge; they sat in exhausted stillness and did nothing at all. She scaled the steps with her head down, but the worry suddenly bloomed from the tips of her toes to an empty space beneath her heart and her head snapped up, and she met the eyes of a hundred lonely vessels and found nothing familiar. Tyko was nowhere.

She found somewhere empty, somewhere high up where she could see everything within the sandstone walls. Moth sat down. She searched the tiny shapes between the rotted flesh creatures in the arena's center, but they were only smudges, specks of dust in her vision, and any one of them could be him—stone-less, destroyed, alone, a walking punishment for the rest of her family waiting to happen; and if he was down there then she hated him; she hated him for saving her when he did, for saving her again only days ago, for agreeing to this when he must've known he'd never last, dooming her family by claiming to be one of them—

"There you are."

Moth jumped.

Tyko planted himself almost clumsily beside her and he let out a heavy sigh.

"Ty—!"

"You ditched me back there." There was a distant glassiness in his gaze. Some of his hair was singed, and black soot clung to his shirt.

"I...I'm sorry?"

For a moment his eyes slid sideways to meet hers, and he flashed her an empty grin. "Ha. I didn't need you, anyways."

He looked away again, the ghost of his smile lingering on his lips. His palms were clasped between his knees, shielding something black and volcanic in his hands. "And you didn't need me either."

Moth watched him. She narrowed her eyes. "Where were you?"

He seemed to be focused on the vessels flooding the arena now, the tiny specks far below that tried in vain to fill the sandstone-colored negative space, but the focus was hidden behind the empty sheen between him and the outside world, the pale film over his eyes.

"Tyko."

"Just here," he muttered quickly. "We hid out in those tunnels."

He looked straight at her and she remembered the day years ago when she had done the same—though she had been running from men with swords, not beasts made of sorcery that didn't need weapons.

"You're scorched."

"Yeah. Something found us."

"What did?"

He almost grinned. "A Flame-crest, I think they're called. The only one in the whole tournament. We took it out alright, but—"

"The only one? How do you know?"

She had a vague image of the creature: dark-scaled, small like a raptor, speckled with orange spots and donning a rounded crest on its head. There was something else about them, too. Something they could do that was unique to their species and a few others.

"Well," Ty started, "it was the last Flame-beast to win a tournament. Not sure how long ago. But they've only given out one each time since. That's how it goes."

Moth was silent. She would have asked so many times before how he knew what he knew—but it was never a good idea, not with him.

"What?" He was looking at her again. His eyebrows were pulled together, an expression somewhere between irritation and worry.

"Have you seen a Null-king yet?" she asked. She didn't know what they looked like. Ty did. Her grandfather did—a Null-king had been part of him, once.

"Not yet," he said. His face had softened. "But we will. It's out there."

* * *

The man that owned the Z-king, long since stowed away in a diamond stone in his pocket, stood beneath them.

Of "them" there were hundreds—had the whittling round done anything at all, she wondered? Had anyone been taken out but the girl that lost her balance over the cliff, the vessel with the Flame-crest Ty had defeated, the little girl and Dusty?

She knew the tiny group the other guards had escorted away from the arena where they had been held hostage had been the rest of them, a sad few she'd never see again, victims to a fate she'd never know.

"Six hundred ninety-six," he called. "Now, that's a good number!" He wore a grin that belonged nowhere, and it stood out on his face with a kind of arrogance that made her hands curl into fists.

"Seventeen eliminated—rather quickly, for that matter. I'm sure you saw the other soliders escort those poor half-souls away. Unfortunately, they're a bit done for."

 _What does that mean?_

"I've got good things to say about the rest of you all. You're particularly brutal this year. In fact-"

He paused, and Moth shivered when his eyes met hers, and it happened so fast and so deliberately it was like he'd been keeping tabs on her position since she returned to the arena so he'd know exactly where she was, for this precise moment. Tyko felt it through her shoulder where it pressed so lightly into his and he turned to her. Moth ignored him.

"—seventeen were taken out, but if you bothered to count, you would've noticed we only had sixteen gathered down below! Seems like this tournament, you're not afraid to kill."

He was smiling at her; a sick smile; no, a smile that said, _you must be sick in the head._

"Moth," Ty growled through his teeth, "why's he looking at you?"

"Seventeen in half a morning," the solider went on. "We've had these things last days just to get rid of three or four, you know."

He surveyed them. Perhaps he was comparing all those other six hundred ninety-five faces to hers, seeking out the features they had in common, wondering if it was a narrowness of the gaze or the absent twitching of a brow that meant killer. More likely they meant scared, alone, anxious. Maybe through certain twists of fate those traits may lead someone to kill. Maybe they were simply destined to.

"Alright then," he said quickly. "We can get the lot of you into teams of three now, which is a bit of a tricky process, mind—for today, you all get scores out of ten for your success in the whittling round. Tonight, aptitude testing begins—another score out of ten. Score high enough out of twenty and you may get the chance to pick a team member."

Moth stiffened.

"It's like it's a game," Ty murmured without moving his lips. "Someone died and we're all just playing a game."

Moth flinched.

"Unfortunately I've been tasked with reading off every score while the others deal with... your mess." Apparently there was no other phrase for the vessels that had already lost.

"You'd best remember what I say," he said as his face hardened. A scathing glare cast over the lot of them, all near-seven hundred, huddled in a tiny fraction of the arena's sandstone seats, close enough to hear but far enough that the weight of his gaze was not so heavy, not so sharp.

"Now. For round zero: the ones. If I call your name, you're damned near useless and you've earned a one."

The waiting began.

It didn't feel like it at first. Moth sat forward, leaning over her thighs with her mind on edge like any moment she'd hear her own name, though she knew that wouldn't happen; they would reward brutality, not punish it, and she was the most brutal of all.

 _No,_ she thought. It wasn't just a guilt-ridden phrase she had used to feel sorry for herself; she truly had done more wrong than anyone out there—the Flame-wolf she had almost knocked over the edge with no second thought, the Sea-spike and the girl she wittingly killed, the trap she'd set for Dusty, the inhuman grief she'd inspired in the girl that lost him—

And after. She had existed in a haze of pseudo-happiness, the aftermath of a cathartic deluge.

And now. The guilt she felt was not real. The guilt, or whatever it was, was naught but a thin veneer wrapped around a ball of indignant, entitled fury; that whatever peace she'd tasted beneath the overhang belonged to her.

Her name was not called.

The soldier moved up along the list of scores and the sun, warm and harsh, slid past its zenith.

Some vessels got up and left, trickling down towards the arena center with one or two others and rounding the curve of the edge to the tunnels. The living quarters must've been down there, she realized, and she drifted into another light-bleached haze, leaning further and further into a kind of welling exhaustion that was only a meager fraction of what had possessed her beneath the overhang—but she threw herself into it willingly—leaning further and further into Tyko's shoulder so she felt it when he jerked upright suddenly, a shrill and unwelcome jolt in the flat unbroken drone the world had ubiquitously dissolved into.

She blinked, looked at him again—the world was burned blue—and he said, "Five. Did you hear him?"

The soldier was locked in a pace, back and forth across a step a bit below them, and deep in a steady and unconscious concentration. He was calling out fives and names she'd never heard and the beasts that would associate with them till the end of their sanity.

"What? Did he call me?" It was harsh and almost silent whisper.

"No." Ty gave her an odd look. "Me."

"Five," she finally echoed. "Because you hid?"

Ty shrugged. "Guess so."

"Why not a one, then?"

"I guess Flame-crests should be difficult to take out."

The way he said it—there was no pride. No satisfaction. Moth wondered what he had seen in the wake of his victory, Hawk perched on his shoulder in the stale dark, watching the human half of the Flame-crest crumble when it had to stand alone, both utterly unsure of what to make of it. Maybe the moment it had fallen, they had both fled again in the dark and hid away from any noise till came the noise nothing could hide from—if only so they wouldn't have to see that again.

The soldier moved on to the sixes. More vessels were leaving, following the others down along the arena walls towards the archway, though they couldn't have been sure of where they were going.

Moth listened. Her name was not called, and Tyko didn't move.

Sevens. Nothing.

The crowd around them had thinned out drastically—she looked, a swift turn of her head right then left, and decided there were less than fifty among them now, the most successful survivors of round zero.

Her eyes fell on someone familiar, and he stared right back. She wondered where the sandstone rock that held his Sea-spine was—in his hands or his pockets?

"Moth and her Sky-horse: eight."

He lingered on this one. She could feel it. It was long enough for a few heads to turn, vainly, searching halfheartedly for the unknown owner of a name they'd never heard before.

The solider moved on.

"Eight," Tyko murmured. "Alright. Come on."

He started to his feet, grabbing her by the wrist. She resisted for half a second, catching the stone-hard gaze of the solider and ashamed that they had disturbed the sacred near-stillness of the group. Those that remained hadn't been standing to leave—they wanted to see who scored the tens.

But she followed Ty. She looked back and scanned the rest: a meager group of tense kids, mostly older than her, sitting in solemn silence like they were remembering every score that came out of the soldier's mouth, every name and the faces they defined. She would never remember them all. These were the threats, the people standing between her and anything she could hope to gain, and there were too many to keep track of.

"Come on," Ty repeated under his breath.

They descended.

"Eight," he said when they reached the bottom. The sandy floor stretched a distance so vast it could swallow them.

It took her a moment to realize what he'd said was a question, and then another to realize she was already shaking her head.

Ty hadn't let go of her wrist. "Hey," she said softly, wriggling it out of his grasp. He gazed back at her, his face almost exactly level with hers. She might've had a bit of height on him. "What happens now?"

His response was so immediate it was jarring, and all she could do was blink at him. "We play the game." He knew her well enough to understand she hadn't been asking about the testing later that night, the tournament's first round coming soon, the way they'd fight and win to ensure the best possible rewards for her family—any of that. They knew what to do. There had never been any question there. "That's all it really is, Moth. A game."

She sighed and felt her heart plunge again into a pit of cold guilt. She had been searching for an answer that didn't exist.

* * *

 **Flame-crest: guan**

 **I just realized that this song I know by my favorite band, called The Moth, actually reflects a lot of what'll happen with Moth's character throughout the story. I'm not telling you who it's by. I just think the unintentional parallels in the lyrics are really cool.**

 **Okay** — **for the third time in a year, I'm having issues with Word. I'm starting to think it's just my computer. Hopefully I can get a new one soon and the act of typing words onto a screen will become less of an exercise in controlling my more violent emotions.**

 **Aaaaand no more OCs. So I can go finalize my outline now.**

 **Starry's Light** — **I'm gonna just say that review was more entertaining to read than probably anything I've ever written. Loopy and detailed reviews are the best... though hopefully you eventually stopped being sick? In most of my stories I got into this habit of just responding to reviews in author notes but if you want me to respond in a PM or just not all, lemme know. And yes! Your OC has a vivosaur. I guess I shouldn't say what it is here but she's gonna show up real soon and it's gonna be cool. And also I'm really super glad you get excited to try and figure out what the vivosaurs are because that's exactly what I'm going for with that. Anyway! Chapter nine was so fun to write. And so was reading this review. Thanks so much for leaving them.**

 **Go review or something, fellas. All eight of you guys. I see you.**

 **-Angel**


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